Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, The Invisible Industry that Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate

Rose George's Ninety Percent of Everything astonishes twice over. First, it offers a detailed view inside the world of freight shipping--an industry that makes modern life possible yet is scarcely considered by the consumers who benefit daily from it. Second, as a work of literary journalism, the book transcends its facts--startling as they are--to present an tale that is half-novel and half-love story, a lesson imparted all the more effectively for its extraordinary telling.

George (The Big Necessity, A Life Removed) writes of her trip aboard the Maersk Kendal, one of the largest ships in a Danish fleet transporting cargo around the world. Along the way, she reveals both the everyday workings and the risks of shipping through eyes that have neither seen nor considered its intricacies before. What is revealed is a vocation that, for all its technology, is scarcely less dangerous than when the 18th-century East India Company held sway. Piracy has become big business, and identifying holding companies, shipowners or even nations liable for the losses and injuries incurred has become all but impossible under an "open registry" system in which many ships become floating pieces of nations with which they may have no affiliation apart from a name written in a logbook and a flag on the stern.

George's love for the journey shines through, but her romantic leanings never take over her clear and sobering presentation of her central argument: shipping is hard on its employees and the ocean, but we cannot live without it. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket

Powered by: Xtenit