The author does a wonderful job of taking the reader inside a world that few ever see. She augments her narrative of travel on board an actual containership with a stellar overview of the global shipping industry and its challenges. For anyone with an interest in maritime topics, or folks like me who worked in international trade for years, Ms. George shines a light on all that we don't typically see.

I like how she combines a narrative of her journey with very relevant digressions into the meat of containerized shipping - schedules and ports, safety and personnel issues, maritime law, piracy, and much more. This is where she really sets herself, and this work, apart. I came away with a much better understanding of life on these vessels, and really hated to reach the end of the book.

The closest thing I have to a criticism, and it most definitely is not, is that she didn't get too deep into the personalities and innermost thoughts of the ship's crew. Still, she gave enough flavor to get a basic feel. Of course further depth into this area would be impossible to gather without an extreme investment in time and contacts - perhaps a lifetime inside the industry. Nevertheless, she did a great overview of this, while giving the reader deep insight into how these ships function, the challenges that the industry faces, and the role of ocean shipping in global trade.

In summary, this was great book and for me, definitely a repeat read. Well written, well researched, fascinating. It held my interest from start to finish. Quality writing and editing - a very good job!

My grandmother came from a seafaring family on the coast of Ireland, and as a little boy I heard countless tales of men at sea (women didn't go to sea except as passengers in her day). Seafaring life sounded dangerous yet fascinating. My relatives in Ireland continued going to sea, but I realize that fewer did so in each succeeding generation, and this book explains why. Most ships fly "flags of convenience" from countries that have little to do with the ship or crew itself. The crews can come from anyplace, and the ownership of ships is often buried in layers of charters and corporate fronts.

The author goes on a trip from Britain to Singapore on a Maersk ship with a British master and an international crew. We get to know the master, who is at the end of his career, and many of his crew members. She details just how monotonous the trip is, and how dangerous it is as the ship goes around the Horn of Africa. Rather than let us suffer through a dreary accounting of that voyage, she digresses into stories about various aspects of the shipping industry.

The author tells us about ships that sink, ships that are abandoned when it's no longer profitable to run them (along with their unfortunate crews), the abuses that come along with the Flag of Convenience system, and mostly the difficulty of going to sea. The shipping business has changed greatly from my great grandfather's time. In his day, there were still sailing ships, and ships under power burned coal. The crew sizes were much larger, and cargo loading and unloading was done by hand. A ship might be in port for weeks while its cargo was unloaded and new cargo loaded.

The author explains how today ships have much smaller crews. With containerization loading and unloading takes hours instead of days or weeks. The city docks in port cities are closed, and now the ships pull up to container ports far away from the centers of the cities. The crews get little or no shore leave, so basically they spend months confined to the ship with no release from the monotony.

I found the book fascinating, but I was disappointed to see that seafaring life isn't what it was in my great grandfather's time. In some ways it has improved (seaman aren't locked in chains or shanghaied like they were in his day), but in other ways it has gotten worse. Being a seafarer has never been easy, and the author effectively conveys this message. However, I always thought being a merchant seaman would be an adventurous life, but that era apparently has passed. I find that very sad.

Do you realize that 90% of the goods we use world wide are transported on the seas around the world and this book deals the container ships and the people who mostly live and work in obscurity. The author hitches a ride on one of these modern day container ships with the largest one being able to carry 15,000 20 foot metal boxes. Do you realize how much product can be moved in one trip. The ship that she rides on hold almost 7,000 containers.

She introduces to us the people that are working on these ships and the conditions they work under with more modern technology and less people on the ships. The nationalities have changed along with the wages and the way the owners take care of the crews. The food that was being served on this ship was pretty sad. With modern day news you are probably aware of the pirate problem on long the Somali coast and there is a chapter or two that deal with this which in my opinion is were this book bogs down a little bit. She also talks about the merchants from the time around WW 1 and WW2 and especially moving story about Diana Jarmin. There is a chapter about all these boats and ships on the water and the effects on the sea life.

I would give this book a 3 1/2 star rating it is a decent read.

The book is an interesting "slice of life" story with lots of factoids and anecdotes mixed into the narrative. It still falls into a category of books which seek to scold the shipping or cruise industry by way of presenting an expose of negative reality. (see "Cruise Ship Blues" for a prime example of clear agendas thinly masked behind claims of objective research and origional discovery.) However I would not say that was so much the intent as the result with this book. There is much to be said that is negative and that is simply what you learn reading the book. But if there was an interest in building sympathy for those working in the industry the book does not achieve that. Rather it simply paints a picture of yet another part of society that has evolved greatly in the last century and has heros and villians on all sides. You are left with a simple reminder that no society has risen without there being an underclass and that there are no "perfect worlds" in which it can be otherwise.

An eye-opening portrait of an industry we depend on every day, yet which operates in a shadowy world outside of the legal and national structures we thought reached everywhere. I hope the understanding Ms. George brings through her book will inspire more effective regulation and oversight to reduce environmental impacts and bring better working conditions to merchant seamen. Moreover, we are all at risk due to the lack of an effective international effort to inspect and control the contents of shipping containers. One criticism of this book is that the narrative structure actually distracts from the content: Ms. George takes an uneventful journey on a container ship from Europe to Asia, and uses it to provide a thuddingly dull storyline to the book. The characters are flat and unsympathetic (in spite of her attempt to romanticize her aging, blue-eyed captain), her discomforts are trivial and annoying (oh, why is there is no internet access and vegetarian menu on a container shop!) and the anecdotes she shares sound more like the bragging of that young person you meet at the hostel in Brussels who wants to one-up you in the category of adventure travel. But don't let that stop you reading this book. Skim through those parts, and drink in the facts. You'll impress your friends with your new knowledge of just how cheap it is to ship by sea these days, the economics of Somali piracy, and why ships sail under flags that have no relation to their cargo, crew, owners, or route.

This book is Extremely well-written, Extremely well-researched, Extremely informative, AND brings much of the hidden "human elements" of this massive industry into our vision. Every one of us is a 'consumer' of the shipping industry, and everyone should read this book. I had to resist the urge to marker-highlight this book to death, as I wanted to share it, unmarked, with others. Interspersing the current with history, and the mundane with drama, Rose George has done a great service here, for those who wish to hear and learn how the world's most crucial "web" works, and ponder how it might work better. As with governments, much of the "shipping" industry is concealed, which Rose uncovers, but not completely --- the tycoons and corporations behind shipping still hide.

Ninety Percent of Everything has a lot going for it. The author, Rose George, writes fluidly, and she has conducted extensive research on the shipping industry. She has enough courage to travel for a month on a container ship from England through the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Aden, and pirate territory in the Indian Ocean all the way to Singapore. She is often both entertaining and informative, as when she reports that "Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters. A Scottish newspaper called this practice `madness,' but actually it's just shipping."

Yet this book left me slightly disappointed. In part, this is because her journey was not particularly dramatic-- after many strong chapters, the book seems to fizzle out near its end. The book's structure is a problem. When the journey doesn't yield up lessons in the issues she intends to discuss, she abruptly switches to accounts of other excursions. The result is a bumpy, if ultimately illuminating, ride.

Not sure why I took an interest in cargo ships but I heard a review of the book and bought it for my Kindle. Happened to go to Savannah at the same time and saw these huge ships float by. Then I saw the movie Captain Phillips. So it sort of all "came together". Anyway, this is a very interesting book and definitely makes it clear that nothing just goes from here to there. Things go from here to there to there to there and end up eventually where they're supposed to be. The part about the pirates didn't interest me very much as I've read about this before but the rest - how these huge ships navigate and how the crew members function and live was very very interesting. The writing was excellent - made what could be a "dry" book into a very readable and interesting one.

Interesante y muy buena investigación

Certainly an interesting read but it could have been written in half the number of pages. F. ex., way too many pages are spent writing about pirates, which while horrible, only affects a tiny number of ships. There are so many other shipping subjects that could have been included instead, tons to choose from but what about at least including an owner's perspective in what is an incredibly volatile industry that is notorious for its boom and bust nature.

This is a book which knits info and language into a wonderful tapestry! Despite being decades into the shipping industry, I learnt a lot! A must book to have if you ever talk about the Suez Jam!

the book gives a very holistic insight into the shipping industry -ranging from work conditions over environmental aspects up to piracy... one does look at shipping & transport with different eyes after reading it!

It takes a really good writer to get you interested in things that you never thought would be interesting. John McPhee managed it for years and Rose George is a worthy successor. So lots of stuff goes around the world in ships. So what? George takes us for a ride on a container ship and the stories she tells are absolutely fascinating. Unless you're in the merchant marine, you will find interesting stuff here and have a jolly good read at the same time.