Overview

On ship-tracking websites, the waters are black with dots. Each dot is a ship; each ship is laden with boxes; each box is laden with goods. In postindustrial economies, we no longer produce but buy. We buy, so we must ship. Without all those dots, the world would not work. Freight shipping has been no less revolutionary than the printing press or the Internet, yet it is all but invisible. Away from public scrutiny, shipping revels in suspect practices, dubious operators, and a shady system. Infesting our waters, poisoning our air, and a prime culprit of acoustic pollution, shipping is environmentally indefensible. And then there are the pirates. Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains, and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

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9781541408289

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Consistently absorbing . . . Timely as well as deft . . . George's spirited book cracks open a vast, treacherous and largely ignored world. ---New York Times

Author Information

Rose George is the author of The Big Necessity and A Life Removed. As a journalist, she has written for the New York Times, Slate, the Guardian, and Scientific American. She lives in Yorkshire, England. Pearl Hewitt is an award-winning British audiobook narrator and voice actor currently living in Houston, Texas. She has narrated over 100 audiobooks in a wide variety of genres.

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