Rating: 
Summary: The Colombo Bay
Review: A wonderful adventure. The author boarded a container ship in Hong Kong the day after the 9/11 attack (his trip had been planned well before that) and sailed for five weeks in and out of ports where huge (20 ft and 40 ft) containers are loaded and unloaded onto those massive ships. A tremendous amount of what we buy here in the US, at great convenience, from toys to clothes to frozen foods, is brought to our few ports on these ships. The staggering coordination, expense, danger and fragility of this shipping world is described here.
The author peppers his journal-type reports on the events of daily life on the ship with bits of merchant marine history, and relevant quotes from sea authors like Melville. Part of what makes the book such a compelling read is his self-deprecating humor as he pokes around in this tough environment, and his great respect and empathy for those whose lives depend on it. These include officers and crew who don't see home or families sometimes for months at a stretch while facing harrowing responsibilities daily, and fellows in Singapore who, for their pittance pay, scramble over the ship in their bare feet hooking up containers to the huge gantry cranes on the docks. He also records a few comments of people from various nationalities about 9/11 and the behavior of our government. He makes us aware of the possible avenues for terrorist attack through the container ship venue, too. One response I felt to this investigation into the shipping container world is a new awareness of another aspect of the fragility of our consumer-oriented life style as Americans.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat Dissapointed
Review: All in all Colombo Bay was a good read. One thing that I think added no value, and detracted from the whole for me was the author's injection of his political views/values about the Bush Administration and the Republicans. While my personal views are not necessarily in contrast, I just think it took away from the story and injected politics into an otherwise interesting study. His ramblings about Melville and Conrad really should have been paired down as well...
Rating:
Summary: Not bad for a landlubber
Review: For a landlubber he does a pretty good job of capturing life in the modern merchant marine and the "hidden" phenomena of how goods are moved across the globe. After having spent 12 years in the merchant marine, albeit on oil tankers, and another 8 as a ship pilot, it is unusual to find someone who is not connected with the industry, get the "feeling" of being at sea correct.In today's world the romance of going to sea is almost completely gone, replaced by the need to have cargo moved cheaply and quickly from point A to B. The size of crews are being reduced all the time while the work load for those remaining is increased, leading to greater fatigue and the more likely chance of an accident happening, no matter how good the crew is. The book will educate as well as entertain and give the reader a glimpse into a world few get to participate in.
Rating:
Summary: Not bad for a landlubber
Review: For a landlubber he does a pretty good job of capturing life in the modern merchant marine and the "hidden" phenomena of how goods are moved across the globe. After having spent 12 years in the merchant marine, albeit on oil tankers, and another 8 as a ship pilot, it is unusual to find someone who is not connected with the industry, get the "feeling" of being at sea correct. In today's world the romance of going to sea is almost completely gone, replaced by the need to have cargo moved cheaply and quickly from point A to B. The size of crews are being reduced all the time while the work load for those remaining is increased, leading to greater fatigue and the more likely chance of an accident happening, no matter how good the crew is. The book will educate as well as entertain and give the reader a glimpse into a world few get to participate in.
Rating: 
Summary: Terror at Sea
Review: If you think the life at sea may be boring and routine, guess again. The Colombo Bay reverses the stereotype and gives the experience on the water an exciting and suspenseful edge. Throughout this book, Richard Pollak paints an authentic picture of the world after the September 11th attack. He displays the inability to transport the worlds most necessary resources from country to country in vivid detail. Also, you will feel as if you are aboard the ship as Pollak virtually places you directly next to Captain Peter Davies. After reading this book, my eyes have opened to an entire new viewpoint on the terror at sea.
Rating:
Summary: The Colombo Bay, Welcome Aboard
Review: Richard Pollak managed to capture the human side of the people onboard in his book The Colombo Bay. It is a great book however I didn't care for the history he mixes into the book and the quotes from other authors. For the rest it is a book that lets you feel the journey, from the conversations with the crew to the short trips on land it all feels real and after finishing the book I had besides an understanding of the importance of container ships in the world trade, also a human feeling about the people who actually live on these boats nine months at a time. Overall a great book and a good read.
Rating:
Summary: Adventures in Shipping
Review: Richard Pollak's new book is a gripping tale of the sea mostly worthy of Conrad and Melville. Pollak rode on the 'Colombo Bay', a modern containerized freighter owned by P&O Nedlloyd, the second biggest shipping concern in the world for a five week voyage halfway around the world. Starting the day after the 9/11 attacks in Hong Kong, and eventually traveling the long way around the world back to his home in New York, Pollak tells readers of the drudgery and excitement that go hand in hand on one of these mammoth vessels. During the course of the voyage he talks with all crew members (as well as with many other characters of all types he meets in port) and relates not only what they say, but what their real points of view are, generally attempting to tell a story from both sides. He not only describes who the sailors are, but their backgrounds and aspirations. He makes the point repeatedly, for instance, that Filipino sailors are prized by shipping companies for three fundamental reasons: they are good workers; they have good attitudes; and they work cheap. He then goes on to deliver the rest of the story from the Filipino sailors point of view, that though they may be making less than someone from the US or Europe would be making doing the same job, they are happy to have the job, as jobs in the Philippines are very scarce and they make more than ten times the average earnings of land based Filipinos. This same type of 'both sides of the story' journalism penetrates the vast majority (with exceptions) of the commentary in the book. Pollak not only discusses the men but the machines involved, and gives us the basic history of containerized cargo. This may not sound very exciting, but it actually is quite interesting to anyone with a view for history and world balance of trade and power. After World War Two, the US led the world in cargo shipping, and now controls almost none. In fact the twenty largest carriers are now headquartered outside the US (even the United States Lines was sold to an Asian investor a few years ago.) The net result of this revolution in containerization has led to much more efficient shipping as well as a huge increase in imports to the US; after all the US has been a net importer since 1976, and now has a roughly $500 Billion trade deficit. Even politicians are beginning to see that this is a significant problem as the US has had a net outflow of jobs to the cheaper countries of the world, taking US dollars with them. Pollak tells this story generally quite well, though his personal biases begin to creep into the discussions. He can't seem to make up his mind if he is protectionist of US jobs (he is a self described liberal), or if he is a free trader (after he sees how much the jobs mean to the third world.) I am sure he isn't the only one with these quandaries, but the net effect here is one of a brilliant opening and discussion of the geopolitics of containerized shipping, with a muddled conclusion drawn from it. He also discusses other threats to shipping, including piracy (a bigger deal than you probably realize), stowaways (shipping companies and crews can't win no matter what they do), fires (the biggest threat to a ship), and weather (still a huge factor in maritime accidents.) My biggest problem in the book is when he digresses from discussing issues relevant to shipping. For instance he has a long discussion about how awful it is that the US is only sixth in the world in foreign aid on a per GDP basis, ignoring the facts that the US is by far first in the world overall (the other countries have vastly smaller economies), and he does not include the overwhelming first place expenses of military and peacekeeping operations worldwide (many of which (for instance, Somalia) came about during the more to his liking Clinton administration) that the US has. He also takes an opportunity to make personal statements about how inhumane it is that the US converted containers into shelters in Guantanamo Bay for Taliban detainees, and alleges with no evidence given that US troops were part of a massacre of Taliban prisoners in the spring of 2002, despite a rigorous investigation that found otherwise. This was brought into the book on the tangential basis that it is relevant because the prisoners were transported in containers. This is his book, and he can put anything he wants to in it, no matter how irrelevant it is. I recognize that as his right, but that is the sole reason that I downgraded this book to four stars. On the plus side, he does discuss the potential for container ships to be used as weapons by terrorists, and generally presents a good introduction to that subject (although even here he decries the prohibition of crewmen being able to leave the ship in the US without background checks, all the while talking about how awful 9/11 was.) Overall, I think 'Colombo Bay' is a masterwork: it is taut, detailed, and human. I recommend it for anyone interested in the global economy, politics, or, obviously, shipping.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern High Seas Adventure
Review: Richard Pollak, a writer with no previous nautical bent, got interested in the marine shipping business for no particular reason except curiosity. A friend became a vice president at P & O Nedlloyd which has a fleet of container ships sailing all over the world, and Pollak asked to book passage in one of them. He left for Hong Kong to board The _Colombo Bay_ carrying a landlubber's baggage including books by Conrad and Melville, CDs of music by Rossini and by Sondheim, and the sort of innocence we all had on 10 September 2001. In _The Colombo Bay_ (Simon & Schuster), Pollak relates how he was asleep in his hotel in Hong Kong and his family was in New York when the World Trade Center towers fell. His family was all right, but the voyage and book project that he had so looked forward to now appeared "indulgent and worse, irrelevant." He wanted to go home, but his wife talked him out of it, and he shipped out. It is good that he did. He didn't know much about the shipping industry when he started, and he learned a lot, and shares it with good humor and the sort of careful explication one expects in, say, a book by John McPhee. Most of the rest of us are ignorant about container shipping, and we shouldn't be. It affects us all. Almost undoubtedly in the very clothes you are wearing are plenty of items that came by container ship, and you own plenty of similar goods all around your house from Asia and the rest of the world. The containers keep the ships at sea, rather than spending time loading and unloading in port. They have to be stowed by computer, to keep the ship balanced, to keep the ones that will be offloaded soon near the top, to keep dangerous contents separated, and so on. The work is dangerous, and as Pollak considers during the weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the dangers have gotten greater. "Flags of Convenience" vessels are registered in countries with minimal shipping industry, and also minimal attention to maintenance, safety, and professional manning. Such vessels would be easy targets for terrorists who wish to tamper with the cargo, or slip a dirty bomb into the thousands of tons of commercial goods. There is a simple threat of piracy, which actually changes some of the routing of Pollak's ship. There are no firearms aboard the ship, reflecting the policy of most liner companies which oblige rather than confront boarded pirates.
Pollak has loaded his narrative with facts. The sludge residue from the burned ship's oil used to be a nuisance that had to be cleaned out periodically, but now such removal is done by specialists who use the sludge in such alchemy as cracking fuels. Pollak feeds a pair of crows that have mistakenly boarded the ship in Colombo, and unable to go anywhere else, stay on for 4,000 miles to Suez. Among the goods carried by the ship are cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, which seem to be an internationally accepted present for, say, quarantine officials who need to be persuaded to hurry about their business and be off. Pollok's book, though, is also intensely personal. He had satisfying friendships with the men on board. He includes conversations and e-mail from those anguished days as he and his family try to understand what has overtaken the world. He has many surprisingly apt quotations from his on-board reading of Melville and Conrad. He has proper reflections on how merchant shipping, moving everything everywhere, improves the world's standard of living, and that globalization is in such a way not only inevitable but good. It is a literally vital industry, remaking the world, but is still an invisible one to most of us. It is worth learning about, and here is a thumping good book by a curious and intelligent tourist to do the job.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern High Seas Adventure
Review: Richard Pollak, a writer with no previous nautical bent, got interested in the marine shipping business for no particular reason except curiosity. A friend became a vice president at P & O Nedlloyd which has a fleet of container ships sailing all over the world, and Pollak asked to book passage in one of them. He left for Hong Kong to board The _Colombo Bay_ carrying a landlubber's baggage including books by Conrad and Melville, CDs of music by Rossini and by Sondheim, and the sort of innocence we all had on 10 September 2001. In _The Colombo Bay_ (Simon & Schuster), Pollak relates how he was asleep in his hotel in Hong Kong and his family was in New York when the World Trade Center towers fell. His family was all right, but the voyage and book project that he had so looked forward to now appeared "indulgent and worse, irrelevant." He wanted to go home, but his wife talked him out of it, and he shipped out. It is good that he did. He didn't know much about the shipping industry when he started, and he learned a lot, and shares it with good humor and the sort of careful explication one expects in, say, a book by John McPhee. Most of the rest of us are ignorant about container shipping, and we shouldn't be. It affects us all. Almost undoubtedly in the very clothes you are wearing are plenty of items that came by container ship, and you own plenty of similar goods all around your house from Asia and the rest of the world. The containers keep the ships at sea, rather than spending time loading and unloading in port. They have to be stowed by computer, to keep the ship balanced, to keep the ones that will be offloaded soon near the top, to keep dangerous contents separated, and so on. The work is dangerous, and as Pollak considers during the weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the dangers have gotten greater. "Flags of Convenience" vessels are registered in countries with minimal shipping industry, and also minimal attention to maintenance, safety, and professional manning. Such vessels would be easy targets for terrorists who wish to tamper with the cargo, or slip a dirty bomb into the thousands of tons of commercial goods. There is a simple threat of piracy, which actually changes some of the routing of Pollak's ship. There are no firearms aboard the ship, reflecting the policy of most liner companies which oblige rather than confront boarded pirates.
Pollak has loaded his narrative with facts. The sludge residue from the burned ship's oil used to be a nuisance that had to be cleaned out periodically, but now such removal is done by specialists who use the sludge in such alchemy as cracking fuels. Pollak feeds a pair of crows that have mistakenly boarded the ship in Colombo, and unable to go anywhere else, stay on for 4,000 miles to Suez. Among the goods carried by the ship are cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, which seem to be an internationally accepted present for, say, quarantine officials who need to be persuaded to hurry about their business and be off. Pollok's book, though, is also intensely personal. He had satisfying friendships with the men on board. He includes conversations and e-mail from those anguished days as he and his family try to understand what has overtaken the world. He has many surprisingly apt quotations from his on-board reading of Melville and Conrad. He has proper reflections on how merchant shipping, moving everything everywhere, improves the world's standard of living, and that globalization is in such a way not only inevitable but good. It is a literally vital industry, remaking the world, but is still an invisible one to most of us. It is worth learning about, and here is a thumping good book by a curious and intelligent tourist to do the job.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern High Seas Adventure
Review: Richard Pollak, a writer with no previous nautical bent, got interested in the marine shipping business for no particular reason except curiosity. A friend became a vice president at P & O Nedlloyd which has a fleet of container ships sailing all over the world, and Pollak asked to book passage in one of them. He left for Hong Kong to board The _Colombo Bay_ carrying a landlubber's baggage including books by Conrad and Melville, CDs of music by Rossini and by Sondheim, and the sort of innocence we all had on 10 September 2001. In _The Colombo Bay_ (Simon & Schuster), Pollak relates how he was asleep in his hotel in Hong Kong and his family was in New York when the World Trade Center towers fell. His family was all right, but the voyage and book project that he had so looked forward to now appeared "indulgent and worse, irrelevant." He wanted to go home, but his wife talked him out of it, and he shipped out. It is good that he did. He didn't know much about the shipping industry when he started, and he learned a lot, and shares it with good humor and the sort of careful explication one expects in, say, a book by John McPhee. Most of the rest of us are ignorant about container shipping, and we shouldn't be. It affects us all. Almost undoubtedly in the very clothes you are wearing are plenty of items that came by container ship, and you own plenty of similar goods all around your house from Asia and the rest of the world. The containers keep the ships at sea, rather than spending time loading and unloading in port. They have to be stowed by computer, to keep the ship balanced, to keep the ones that will be offloaded soon near the top, to keep dangerous contents separated, and so on. The work is dangerous, and as Pollak considers during the weeks after the 9-11 attacks, the dangers have gotten greater. "Flags of Convenience" vessels are registered in countries with minimal shipping industry, and also minimal attention to maintenance, safety, and professional manning. Such vessels would be easy targets for terrorists who wish to tamper with the cargo, or slip a dirty bomb into the thousands of tons of commercial goods. There is a simple threat of piracy, which actually changes some of the routing of Pollak's ship. There are no firearms aboard the ship, reflecting the policy of most liner companies which oblige rather than confront boarded pirates.
Pollak has loaded his narrative with facts. The sludge residue from the burned ship's oil used to be a nuisance that had to be cleaned out periodically, but now such removal is done by specialists who use the sludge in such alchemy as cracking fuels. Pollak feeds a pair of crows that have mistakenly boarded the ship in Colombo, and unable to go anywhere else, stay on for 4,000 miles to Suez. Among the goods carried by the ship are cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, which seem to be an internationally accepted present for, say, quarantine officials who need to be persuaded to hurry about their business and be off. Pollok's book, though, is also intensely personal. He had satisfying friendships with the men on board. He includes conversations and e-mail from those anguished days as he and his family try to understand what has overtaken the world. He has many surprisingly apt quotations from his on-board reading of Melville and Conrad. He has proper reflections on how merchant shipping, moving everything everywhere, improves the world's standard of living, and that globalization is in such a way not only inevitable but good. It is a literally vital industry, remaking the world, but is still an invisible one to most of us. It is worth learning about, and here is a thumping good book by a curious and intelligent tourist to do the job.
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