We are frequently late to the party. Fortunately it is often just in the nick of time.  This time, thanks to one of the podcasts we regularly listen to for exactly this purpose, we re-discovered Rose George (having first learned of her through her book previous book, The Big Necessity) and discovered her new book as it hits the market. There does not appear to be much in direct relation to community, conservation or collaboration  within this book, but we appreciate the author’s dedication to a topic that helps us understand better how our world works:

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 shipping there would be no clothes, food, paper, or fuel. 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 of “flags of convenience.” 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 through 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 are inflicting on 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.

From the bio on her website:

Rose George began writing in 1994, as an intern at The Nation. Later, she became senior editor and writer at COLORS, the bilingual “global magazine about local cultures” published in 80 countries and based first in Rome, then Paris, then Venice. In 1999, she moved to London and began a freelance career, and has since written for the New York Times, Guardian, Independent,London Review of Books and many others. She has been war correspondent in Kosovo for Condé Nast Travelermagazine; reported on an alternative World Cup final in Bhutan between Bhutan and Montserrat (Bhutan won); and attended Saddam Hussein’s birthday party, twice.

Rose’s first book, A Life Removed: Hunting for Refuge in the Modern World, explored the daily reality of being a refugee, focusing on the situation of the millions of people displaced by Liberia’s awful wars. Her second book is The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste/The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters, published by Portobello (UK) and Metropolitan (US). It was judged one of the best books of 2008 by The Economist newspaper, and one of the top ten science books of the same year by the American Library Association. She is currently working on a book about shipping.

Rose received a congratulatory first-class honours BA in modern languages from the University of Oxford in 1992, and an MA in international politics in 1994 from the University of Pennsylvania. She speaks fluent French and Italian and lives sometimes in Yorkshire, sometimes in a former hotel (three floors; one toilet) in south-west France; and as often as possible on a ship.