Blogger Recommendation: Dave Munger

Continuing my series of books recommended by fellow bloggers, Dave Munger of the highly entertaining and intelligent Word Munger has contributed a review of The Outlaw Sea. Dave consumed this book via audio, and in addition to discussing the book he examines the differences between reading a book and listening to it. Dave also runs a second blog called Cognitive Daily.
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The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime
by William Langewiesche

By Dave Munger

I was first introduced to William Langewiesche's writing a few years ago, back when The Atlantic still offered much of its content for free, online. He was reporting on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, and the looting that occurred both during and after the disaster. Dozens of irate readers wrote in, mightily offended at how he disrespected police and firefighters everywhere, shocked at the insinuation that New York street cops were anything less than models of dignified behavior. Langewiesche, in a two-page response, carefully and methodically shredded the criticism to bits. He had spent months researching the story, right onsite, as the search for victims and the removal of rubble occurred, and had dozens of eyewitness reports to back every assertion he had made. I was impressed with his cool response, but equally with his elegant, yet still somewhat spare writing style.

So when his newest book appeared, again accompanied by a lengthy excerpt in The Atlantic, I took notice. The Outlaw Sea is an attempt to explain the way the world of the open ocean works, how it is both shaped by and shapes itself in opposition to the human world onshore. Since I was planning a long drive, I decided to buy the audiobook version, which I downloaded in about 30 minutes from Apple's iTunes Music Service. The 256-page printed book becomes a roughly seven-and-a-half-hour audiobook, which is read by the author himself. I began listening to the book while negotiating a difficult road in a violent thunderstorm, and Langewiesche's rugged, gravelly voice contributed to the drama of the moment.

The text itself achieved the rest. One of The Outlaw Sea's theses is that the open ocean is a precarious place, that ships are maintained on the edge of seaworthiness, that crews are hired more based on how little pay they'll accept than how well equipped they are to handle the rigors of navigation in stormy seas. What better visual aid to accompany this narrative than hurtling across West Virginia's mountains in a late-winter thunderstorm? I finished the drive with about three hours left in the book, and the story seemed positively dull by comparison as I finished the book listening in my kitchen or driving around town running errands over the next few days.

This is not to say that The Outlaw Sea is a dull book; if anything, Langewiesche overdramatizes the text with his extended descriptions of nautical disasters, crowned by the horrific three-and-a-half hour description of the Estonia tragedy in the Baltic Sea in 1994, where over 800 people died in the sudden capsizing of a car ferry bound for Sweden. Langewiesche offers several different recountings of the same series of events: that of the JAIC, the official international organization charged with investigating the disaster; of the conspiracy-theorist filmmaker who dramatized it in an ostensibly true re-creation attributing the disaster to a deliberate bombing; of the ship's builder, a German firm primarily interested in exonerating itself from responsibility for the hundreds of lives lost; and of several eyewitnesses who survived the sinking.

Langewiesche takes pains to note the many horrific ways people managed to die in the tragedy, from being trapped inside the sinking ship, to "murder" by theft of a life vest, to simply expiring from cold and exhaustion in a life raft on a frigid morning, less than an hour from rescue. He also observes that the Estonia sinking is by no means unusual -- such events occur almost routinely in the Third World on overloaded ferries from Bangledesh to Tanganyika to Senegal, where thousands of passengers have died in single incidents. While the grief that accompanies such tragedy in the impoverished areas of the world is no less real than when a modern European ferry sinks, Langewiesche points out that the West feels justified in relegating these Third-World disasters to page 2 in newspapers: "there is no doubt that racism played a role in the lack of response, but it is also simply these nations' track record that caused the world to turn away. Their cities were impossibly overloaded; was there any reason to expect that their ships wouldn't be?" Langewiesche calls even the new nation of Estonia a "little Switzerland by comparison": the contrast of the dramatic disaster to the placid streets of Tallinn was therefore somehow more newsworthy. Yet Langeweische himself falls victim to this same hypocrisy, devoting nearly half the book to the Estonia tragedy, but only a few minutes to a series of more significant disasters in impoverished developing nations.

It is hard not to sense a bit of braggadocio listening to Langewiesche narrate in his rough, well-traveled voice. When questioning the Indian defense attorney defending the crew of a ship accused of piracy, he is almost mocking as he asks why the lawyer didn't investigate the Indonesian manning agents that were a critical part of his clients' alibi. He tells the pirates he'd be glad to pop over to Djakarta to investigate himself, but this seems almost more designed to show off Langewiesche's own worldliness than a genuine offer to help.

Perhaps I get this sense more because of the audiobook form than from any sort of pretension on Langewiesche's part. He's certainly not as arrogant as his Atlantic colleague Robert Kaplan, who in an article about U.S. military trainers in Niger refers incessantly to his broad experience traveling with troops around the globe. The form of an audiobook also invites subtle editorial commentary through emphasis of words and intonation. Take, for example, when Langewiesche discusses the efforts to create better standards at sea. He calls the international ship registry "a blanket requirement that was typically subverted by the righteous compliance of everyone involved." He says the words "righteous compliance" with a distinct sneer, a tone that suggests not only the hypocrisy of the complying nations, but also the hint that those in charge of creating the registry were aware of its futility from the start.

Audiobooks require an odd mix of close attention and preoccupation on the part of the listener. I found that if I turned my attention away from the narrative for even a moment I could easily miss an important point. Yet if I was able to be completely attentive to the book, I quickly became bored. Driving a car is almost the perfect distraction: the book offers just enough respite from the boredom of driving to keep me alert. When I arrived home with three hours of narrative remaining, I struggled for a while to find the perfect tasks to do while listening. I couldn't check e-mail: that diverted too much of my attention. Doing the dishes worked, but only took a few minutes, and the noise of the sink sometimes drowned out the audio. There was a point when I wished I had bought the physical book so I could just sit down and finish it.

The end of The Outlaw Sea was indeed compelling, and finally I had to listen to it just sitting at my freshly cleaned kitchen counter. Langewiesche takes us to Alang, India, where hundreds of ships are scrapped each year in appalling conditions. There, 40,000 workers crawl over ships poisoned by toxic chemicals, removing asbestos insulation by hand, subject to dangerous explosive gases as they use blowtorches to disassemble fuel tanks and expired diesel engines. He talks to a representative of Greenpeace, which has picked up the Alang site as a talking point in its case for controlling pollution worldwide, but also to the men at Alang, who see themselves as skilled workers plying an honest trade in a nation devastated by poverty, and their bosses, who claim they are providing economic opportunity and that the jobs would only move elsewhere if their shipbreaking operations were shut down.

Though the level of detail Langewiesche provides is sometimes excruciating, and though I might have preferred a bit more analysis of the possible causes and realistic solutions to the often tragic problems of international shipping, overall I found The Outlaw Sea fascinating and engaging. If you have a long drive in your future (or even a regular commute -- though preferably in good weather), you might even consider the audiobook version.
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Previous Blogger Recommendations
Derik A. Badman (Madinkbeard) -- Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau

Comments

[Bud Parr]

Excellent review! Thanks guys, I would have never known about this - it's interesting to hear about a book that was consumed aurally,

[Anne]

Thanks, guys. I am a bit pirate-obsessed and, like Bud, wouldn't have ever found this book otherwise. I love reading about shipwrecks, though, so I may check it out. Thanks.

[Kevan]

Audible has a good 10 minute section of the audiobook about Flags of Convenience.

[Lyndon the Adult eBook Webmaster]

I think combining pirates and erotica would be an intoxicating combination. Why not give it a go!