The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

Interesting, But Too Much Time Spent On The Estonia Story, 08 Feb 2007
This is an interesting book in some respects, which highlights the modern dangers of the sea. Most shore dwellers have romantic notions about the sea and seafarers, which are quite erroneous. Seamen are just people doing a job like anyone else, the difference being that they live in the factory instead of commuting there every day after staying in their own homes. Another difference is that the factory travels around the world, and that it moves quite a lot under your feet when the weather is bad ! Try to imagine having to work in your office or factory floor while an earthquake is going on. The sea can be a harsh mistress, but for some people she provides a decent, although precarious, living. I know - I am a seafarer myself. Others are not so lucky, and this book makes the point, describing the mayhem that can sometimes happen. Pirates are not comic Johnny Depp characters, nor are they armed with cutlasses any more. They are vicious, sometimes murderous, criminals often armed nowadays with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles. The book also gives some insight into modern piracy.

If I have any criticism of the book, it has to be that the author spent far too much time dealing with the loss of the ferry "Estonia" which sank in the Baltic Sea with massive loss of life. It seemed to me that the book was written as an excuse to go into minute detail about this incident.

Another criticism has to be the introduction, at one point, of the nowadays obligatory politically correct statement which is completely off the mark. On one page he highlights the fact that the loss of the Estonia provoked many pages of news in the Western press, while ferry disasters in third world countries were almost ignored. Part of the reason for this discrepancy, according to Langewiesche, is racism, and the fact that the Estonia's victims were white, while in third world countries they are not. This is complete nonsense, and is nothing more than the author's bit of pandering to the gurus of political correctness, which seems to be de rigeur nowadays in every book from cheap novels to academic works. All it did for me was to cause me to treat the author with somewhat less respect than I had up to that point. The real reason is that people are naturally more interested in news from close to home. Anyone in Europe could have been on the Estonia the night she sank, but our chances of being on an overcrowded and undisciplined Congolese or Pakistani ferry would be pretty slim. Hence we are more interested in news that impinges on us close to home.

Overall, a decent read, but the Estonia incident does drag on a bit and more diversity on other aspects of chaos at sea would have been better. I'll give it two stars. I've read worse !


Good stories but trashy analysis, 23 Dec 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the 'al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational. For example, oil spills from tankers, which averaged 400,000 tonnes a year in the late 1970s, averaged 27,000 tonnes a year in the present decade - a reduction of over 93%. So how can anti-pollution laws have been "ineffectual", as one reviewer was led to believe?
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.


Gripping stories but trashy analysis, 24 Jun 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the `al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational.
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.

Superb. Wild life in the oceans that makes up 3/4 of Earth, 07 Apr 2006
He writes very well, in a hard-bitten, American manner. Well-informed and endlessly fascinating. Will change your view about how life is lived by unconstrained humans. As Conrad and Melville show, in the pure lawless anarchy and freedom of the world's oceans one confronts often dark truths about humanity. The Outlaw Sea shows that this is as true today as ever. A must-read.

The Sea as a Scary Place, 12 Jan 2006
I really liked Langewiesche's previous book on the Sahara desert, and also have a minor fascination with modern piracy, so I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it. The six chapters function as semi-independent essays (bits of which appeared in The Atlantic), within an overall thesis that the world's oceans are essentially places of anarchy, and civilization exists only tenuously (at best) aboard seagoing vessels.

Chapter One introduces the reader to this anarchic world of flags of convenience, shadow ownership, holding companies, the cheapest crews money can buy, and unsafe, decrepit ships. This is done via the case of the Kristal, a 27-year-old tanker carrying molasses and a Croatian, Spanish, and Pakistani crew when it split in two and sank in off the coast of Spain in February 2001. The disaster is reconstructed from the testimony of the few survivors, and concludes with furtive settlements to them and an utter inability to determine who actually owned the ship. Through this, Langewiesche describes how most shipping is regulated by the International Marine Organization (a UN agency), and, rather depressingly, how -- despite all kinds of conventions, agreements, regulations, and inspections -- ships are constantly sinking at sea and lives are being lost.

Chapter Two is about security, both of ports and of ships. The vast majority of modern commercial piracy takes place near the Straights of Malacca, and Langewiesche takes the reader through one such case -- the October 1999 hijacking of the $10 million Japanese cargo ship Alondra Rainbow and its $10 million cargo of aluminum. Again, Langewiesche reconstructs the event through individual testimony and court records: from the Indonesian pirate leader's planning via cell phone with a Chinese boss, to the storming of the ship by multinational gang of Malays, Thais, Chinese, and others, to the ship's disappearance, and the pirates' eventual capture and prosecution by India. The disappearance is especially fascinating in this era of GPS and satellite imaging, and an important digression is made on the impossibility of tracking, never mind identifying all the ships at sea (some 30 million by one U.S. Coast Guard estimate). Anyone concerned about terrorists using boats or ports to deliver WMDs to the doorstep of the U.S. will probably not want to read this section, as it is rather chilling stuff.

The very brief third chapter provides a little more background on how international regulations work in practice, here in the case of oil spills. This first grew into a major concern following a series of incidents in the mid-1970s, and blossomed into a full political issue after the Exxon Valdez crash. Langewiesche shows how American and European bureaucracies have responded over the last several decades, and how ineffectual these new rules regulations have been.

Chapters four and five (totaling around 100 pages) deal with the September 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in rough Baltic waters, killing more than 850 people. And if you thought "The Perfect Storm" was heartbreaking, wait until you read this. The reconstruction (again, from survivors and the massive legal record) makes for terrifying reading, and no one who reads it will ever take a ride on a Baltic ferry. It's brilliant writing, tackling both the furious legal and technical debate about the cause of the disaster, and the harrowing human side, as people literally claw and climb over each other to survive. At times, the reconstruction gets a little too colorful as the attempts to show how most of the people become Darwinian animals get a bit much, but it's still nightmare-inducing stuff. It's an incredibly convoluted and contested tale, but one that does a very effective job of showing how the ocean can quickly reduce order to chaos and how the failure of regulation can lead to large tragedy.

The final chapter is somewhat tangential to the book's main thrust, as it deals with what happens to ships at the end of their lives rather than the chaos that rules the high seas. Here, Langewiesche covers the shipbreaking beach at Alang, India. Here, ships come to die, driven ashore and then manually broken down in scrap metal and salvageable parts by poorly paid crews who live in squalid work camps and are exposed to all manner of toxins from the dead ships. Various activist campaigns have brought world attention to the plight of these workers, but Langewiesche points out that shipbreaking is a booming field and even more wretched facilities exist elsewhere in South Asia. What the responsibility of shipbuilding nations is becomes a very murky matter and there are no easy answers.

This is a very good book, and each chapter stands on its own as an accessible introduction to one or two maritime topics which could easily merit entire books. Langewiesche is very good at blending travel reportage, investigative interviews, and archival research to create very compelling stories. Throughout, even though the topics can be rather abstract legally or technically arcane, he always writes with great compassion and clarity about the people who are affected.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

Interesting, But Too Much Time Spent On The Estonia Story, 08 Feb 2007
This is an interesting book in some respects, which highlights the modern dangers of the sea. Most shore dwellers have romantic notions about the sea and seafarers, which are quite erroneous. Seamen are just people doing a job like anyone else, the difference being that they live in the factory instead of commuting there every day after staying in their own homes. Another difference is that the factory travels around the world, and that it moves quite a lot under your feet when the weather is bad ! Try to imagine having to work in your office or factory floor while an earthquake is going on. The sea can be a harsh mistress, but for some people she provides a decent, although precarious, living. I know - I am a seafarer myself. Others are not so lucky, and this book makes the point, describing the mayhem that can sometimes happen. Pirates are not comic Johnny Depp characters, nor are they armed with cutlasses any more. They are vicious, sometimes murderous, criminals often armed nowadays with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles. The book also gives some insight into modern piracy.

If I have any criticism of the book, it has to be that the author spent far too much time dealing with the loss of the ferry "Estonia" which sank in the Baltic Sea with massive loss of life. It seemed to me that the book was written as an excuse to go into minute detail about this incident.

Another criticism has to be the introduction, at one point, of the nowadays obligatory politically correct statement which is completely off the mark. On one page he highlights the fact that the loss of the Estonia provoked many pages of news in the Western press, while ferry disasters in third world countries were almost ignored. Part of the reason for this discrepancy, according to Langewiesche, is racism, and the fact that the Estonia's victims were white, while in third world countries they are not. This is complete nonsense, and is nothing more than the author's bit of pandering to the gurus of political correctness, which seems to be de rigeur nowadays in every book from cheap novels to academic works. All it did for me was to cause me to treat the author with somewhat less respect than I had up to that point. The real reason is that people are naturally more interested in news from close to home. Anyone in Europe could have been on the Estonia the night she sank, but our chances of being on an overcrowded and undisciplined Congolese or Pakistani ferry would be pretty slim. Hence we are more interested in news that impinges on us close to home.

Overall, a decent read, but the Estonia incident does drag on a bit and more diversity on other aspects of chaos at sea would have been better. I'll give it two stars. I've read worse !


Good stories but trashy analysis, 23 Dec 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the 'al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational. For example, oil spills from tankers, which averaged 400,000 tonnes a year in the late 1970s, averaged 27,000 tonnes a year in the present decade - a reduction of over 93%. So how can anti-pollution laws have been "ineffectual", as one reviewer was led to believe?
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.


Gripping stories but trashy analysis, 24 Jun 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the `al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational.
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.

Superb. Wild life in the oceans that makes up 3/4 of Earth, 07 Apr 2006
He writes very well, in a hard-bitten, American manner. Well-informed and endlessly fascinating. Will change your view about how life is lived by unconstrained humans. As Conrad and Melville show, in the pure lawless anarchy and freedom of the world's oceans one confronts often dark truths about humanity. The Outlaw Sea shows that this is as true today as ever. A must-read.

The Sea as a Scary Place, 12 Jan 2006
I really liked Langewiesche's previous book on the Sahara desert, and also have a minor fascination with modern piracy, so I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it. The six chapters function as semi-independent essays (bits of which appeared in The Atlantic), within an overall thesis that the world's oceans are essentially places of anarchy, and civilization exists only tenuously (at best) aboard seagoing vessels.

Chapter One introduces the reader to this anarchic world of flags of convenience, shadow ownership, holding companies, the cheapest crews money can buy, and unsafe, decrepit ships. This is done via the case of the Kristal, a 27-year-old tanker carrying molasses and a Croatian, Spanish, and Pakistani crew when it split in two and sank in off the coast of Spain in February 2001. The disaster is reconstructed from the testimony of the few survivors, and concludes with furtive settlements to them and an utter inability to determine who actually owned the ship. Through this, Langewiesche describes how most shipping is regulated by the International Marine Organization (a UN agency), and, rather depressingly, how -- despite all kinds of conventions, agreements, regulations, and inspections -- ships are constantly sinking at sea and lives are being lost.

Chapter Two is about security, both of ports and of ships. The vast majority of modern commercial piracy takes place near the Straights of Malacca, and Langewiesche takes the reader through one such case -- the October 1999 hijacking of the $10 million Japanese cargo ship Alondra Rainbow and its $10 million cargo of aluminum. Again, Langewiesche reconstructs the event through individual testimony and court records: from the Indonesian pirate leader's planning via cell phone with a Chinese boss, to the storming of the ship by multinational gang of Malays, Thais, Chinese, and others, to the ship's disappearance, and the pirates' eventual capture and prosecution by India. The disappearance is especially fascinating in this era of GPS and satellite imaging, and an important digression is made on the impossibility of tracking, never mind identifying all the ships at sea (some 30 million by one U.S. Coast Guard estimate). Anyone concerned about terrorists using boats or ports to deliver WMDs to the doorstep of the U.S. will probably not want to read this section, as it is rather chilling stuff.

The very brief third chapter provides a little more background on how international regulations work in practice, here in the case of oil spills. This first grew into a major concern following a series of incidents in the mid-1970s, and blossomed into a full political issue after the Exxon Valdez crash. Langewiesche shows how American and European bureaucracies have responded over the last several decades, and how ineffectual these new rules regulations have been.

Chapters four and five (totaling around 100 pages) deal with the September 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in rough Baltic waters, killing more than 850 people. And if you thought "The Perfect Storm" was heartbreaking, wait until you read this. The reconstruction (again, from survivors and the massive legal record) makes for terrifying reading, and no one who reads it will ever take a ride on a Baltic ferry. It's brilliant writing, tackling both the furious legal and technical debate about the cause of the disaster, and the harrowing human side, as people literally claw and climb over each other to survive. At times, the reconstruction gets a little too colorful as the attempts to show how most of the people become Darwinian animals get a bit much, but it's still nightmare-inducing stuff. It's an incredibly convoluted and contested tale, but one that does a very effective job of showing how the ocean can quickly reduce order to chaos and how the failure of regulation can lead to large tragedy.

The final chapter is somewhat tangential to the book's main thrust, as it deals with what happens to ships at the end of their lives rather than the chaos that rules the high seas. Here, Langewiesche covers the shipbreaking beach at Alang, India. Here, ships come to die, driven ashore and then manually broken down in scrap metal and salvageable parts by poorly paid crews who live in squalid work camps and are exposed to all manner of toxins from the dead ships. Various activist campaigns have brought world attention to the plight of these workers, but Langewiesche points out that shipbreaking is a booming field and even more wretched facilities exist elsewhere in South Asia. What the responsibility of shipbuilding nations is becomes a very murky matter and there are no easy answers.

This is a very good book, and each chapter stands on its own as an accessible introduction to one or two maritime topics which could easily merit entire books. Langewiesche is very good at blending travel reportage, investigative interviews, and archival research to create very compelling stories. Throughout, even though the topics can be rather abstract legally or technically arcane, he always writes with great compassion and clarity about the people who are affected.

Great for boaters, 15 Apr 2003
This guide was written to replace the old "Link House" book for those boating on the Thames, but also has useful information for walkers, cyclists and anglers. For those navigating the river it is most useful in the area of locks. If you intend stopping a lot you might want to supplement it with the Nicholson guide for more details of villages, pubs and other attractions.

The Author is a lockkeeper on the river - he may offer to sign it for you!

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

Interesting, But Too Much Time Spent On The Estonia Story, 08 Feb 2007
This is an interesting book in some respects, which highlights the modern dangers of the sea. Most shore dwellers have romantic notions about the sea and seafarers, which are quite erroneous. Seamen are just people doing a job like anyone else, the difference being that they live in the factory instead of commuting there every day after staying in their own homes. Another difference is that the factory travels around the world, and that it moves quite a lot under your feet when the weather is bad ! Try to imagine having to work in your office or factory floor while an earthquake is going on. The sea can be a harsh mistress, but for some people she provides a decent, although precarious, living. I know - I am a seafarer myself. Others are not so lucky, and this book makes the point, describing the mayhem that can sometimes happen. Pirates are not comic Johnny Depp characters, nor are they armed with cutlasses any more. They are vicious, sometimes murderous, criminals often armed nowadays with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles. The book also gives some insight into modern piracy.

If I have any criticism of the book, it has to be that the author spent far too much time dealing with the loss of the ferry "Estonia" which sank in the Baltic Sea with massive loss of life. It seemed to me that the book was written as an excuse to go into minute detail about this incident.

Another criticism has to be the introduction, at one point, of the nowadays obligatory politically correct statement which is completely off the mark. On one page he highlights the fact that the loss of the Estonia provoked many pages of news in the Western press, while ferry disasters in third world countries were almost ignored. Part of the reason for this discrepancy, according to Langewiesche, is racism, and the fact that the Estonia's victims were white, while in third world countries they are not. This is complete nonsense, and is nothing more than the author's bit of pandering to the gurus of political correctness, which seems to be de rigeur nowadays in every book from cheap novels to academic works. All it did for me was to cause me to treat the author with somewhat less respect than I had up to that point. The real reason is that people are naturally more interested in news from close to home. Anyone in Europe could have been on the Estonia the night she sank, but our chances of being on an overcrowded and undisciplined Congolese or Pakistani ferry would be pretty slim. Hence we are more interested in news that impinges on us close to home.

Overall, a decent read, but the Estonia incident does drag on a bit and more diversity on other aspects of chaos at sea would have been better. I'll give it two stars. I've read worse !


Good stories but trashy analysis, 23 Dec 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the 'al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational. For example, oil spills from tankers, which averaged 400,000 tonnes a year in the late 1970s, averaged 27,000 tonnes a year in the present decade - a reduction of over 93%. So how can anti-pollution laws have been "ineffectual", as one reviewer was led to believe?
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.


Gripping stories but trashy analysis, 24 Jun 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the `al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational.
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.

Superb. Wild life in the oceans that makes up 3/4 of Earth, 07 Apr 2006
He writes very well, in a hard-bitten, American manner. Well-informed and endlessly fascinating. Will change your view about how life is lived by unconstrained humans. As Conrad and Melville show, in the pure lawless anarchy and freedom of the world's oceans one confronts often dark truths about humanity. The Outlaw Sea shows that this is as true today as ever. A must-read.

The Sea as a Scary Place, 12 Jan 2006
I really liked Langewiesche's previous book on the Sahara desert, and also have a minor fascination with modern piracy, so I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it. The six chapters function as semi-independent essays (bits of which appeared in The Atlantic), within an overall thesis that the world's oceans are essentially places of anarchy, and civilization exists only tenuously (at best) aboard seagoing vessels.

Chapter One introduces the reader to this anarchic world of flags of convenience, shadow ownership, holding companies, the cheapest crews money can buy, and unsafe, decrepit ships. This is done via the case of the Kristal, a 27-year-old tanker carrying molasses and a Croatian, Spanish, and Pakistani crew when it split in two and sank in off the coast of Spain in February 2001. The disaster is reconstructed from the testimony of the few survivors, and concludes with furtive settlements to them and an utter inability to determine who actually owned the ship. Through this, Langewiesche describes how most shipping is regulated by the International Marine Organization (a UN agency), and, rather depressingly, how -- despite all kinds of conventions, agreements, regulations, and inspections -- ships are constantly sinking at sea and lives are being lost.

Chapter Two is about security, both of ports and of ships. The vast majority of modern commercial piracy takes place near the Straights of Malacca, and Langewiesche takes the reader through one such case -- the October 1999 hijacking of the $10 million Japanese cargo ship Alondra Rainbow and its $10 million cargo of aluminum. Again, Langewiesche reconstructs the event through individual testimony and court records: from the Indonesian pirate leader's planning via cell phone with a Chinese boss, to the storming of the ship by multinational gang of Malays, Thais, Chinese, and others, to the ship's disappearance, and the pirates' eventual capture and prosecution by India. The disappearance is especially fascinating in this era of GPS and satellite imaging, and an important digression is made on the impossibility of tracking, never mind identifying all the ships at sea (some 30 million by one U.S. Coast Guard estimate). Anyone concerned about terrorists using boats or ports to deliver WMDs to the doorstep of the U.S. will probably not want to read this section, as it is rather chilling stuff.

The very brief third chapter provides a little more background on how international regulations work in practice, here in the case of oil spills. This first grew into a major concern following a series of incidents in the mid-1970s, and blossomed into a full political issue after the Exxon Valdez crash. Langewiesche shows how American and European bureaucracies have responded over the last several decades, and how ineffectual these new rules regulations have been.

Chapters four and five (totaling around 100 pages) deal with the September 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in rough Baltic waters, killing more than 850 people. And if you thought "The Perfect Storm" was heartbreaking, wait until you read this. The reconstruction (again, from survivors and the massive legal record) makes for terrifying reading, and no one who reads it will ever take a ride on a Baltic ferry. It's brilliant writing, tackling both the furious legal and technical debate about the cause of the disaster, and the harrowing human side, as people literally claw and climb over each other to survive. At times, the reconstruction gets a little too colorful as the attempts to show how most of the people become Darwinian animals get a bit much, but it's still nightmare-inducing stuff. It's an incredibly convoluted and contested tale, but one that does a very effective job of showing how the ocean can quickly reduce order to chaos and how the failure of regulation can lead to large tragedy.

The final chapter is somewhat tangential to the book's main thrust, as it deals with what happens to ships at the end of their lives rather than the chaos that rules the high seas. Here, Langewiesche covers the shipbreaking beach at Alang, India. Here, ships come to die, driven ashore and then manually broken down in scrap metal and salvageable parts by poorly paid crews who live in squalid work camps and are exposed to all manner of toxins from the dead ships. Various activist campaigns have brought world attention to the plight of these workers, but Langewiesche points out that shipbreaking is a booming field and even more wretched facilities exist elsewhere in South Asia. What the responsibility of shipbuilding nations is becomes a very murky matter and there are no easy answers.

This is a very good book, and each chapter stands on its own as an accessible introduction to one or two maritime topics which could easily merit entire books. Langewiesche is very good at blending travel reportage, investigative interviews, and archival research to create very compelling stories. Throughout, even though the topics can be rather abstract legally or technically arcane, he always writes with great compassion and clarity about the people who are affected.

Great for boaters, 15 Apr 2003
This guide was written to replace the old "Link House" book for those boating on the Thames, but also has useful information for walkers, cyclists and anglers. For those navigating the river it is most useful in the area of locks. If you intend stopping a lot you might want to supplement it with the Nicholson guide for more details of villages, pubs and other attractions.

The Author is a lockkeeper on the river - he may offer to sign it for you!

A solid Introduction, 24 May 2003
Ward provides a thorough introduction to the discipline of hydrology. He uses a variety of good examples to illustrate the new developments within the subject. His belief in the benefits of modelling hydrological processes are apparent throughout the book. The chapter on catchment hydrology of considerable merrit.

Hydro-amazing!, 03 Dec 1998
Definitely the 'Principle' book about hydrology.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

Interesting, But Too Much Time Spent On The Estonia Story, 08 Feb 2007
This is an interesting book in some respects, which highlights the modern dangers of the sea. Most shore dwellers have romantic notions about the sea and seafarers, which are quite erroneous. Seamen are just people doing a job like anyone else, the difference being that they live in the factory instead of commuting there every day after staying in their own homes. Another difference is that the factory travels around the world, and that it moves quite a lot under your feet when the weather is bad ! Try to imagine having to work in your office or factory floor while an earthquake is going on. The sea can be a harsh mistress, but for some people she provides a decent, although precarious, living. I know - I am a seafarer myself. Others are not so lucky, and this book makes the point, describing the mayhem that can sometimes happen. Pirates are not comic Johnny Depp characters, nor are they armed with cutlasses any more. They are vicious, sometimes murderous, criminals often armed nowadays with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles. The book also gives some insight into modern piracy.

If I have any criticism of the book, it has to be that the author spent far too much time dealing with the loss of the ferry "Estonia" which sank in the Baltic Sea with massive loss of life. It seemed to me that the book was written as an excuse to go into minute detail about this incident.

Another criticism has to be the introduction, at one point, of the nowadays obligatory politically correct statement which is completely off the mark. On one page he highlights the fact that the loss of the Estonia provoked many pages of news in the Western press, while ferry disasters in third world countries were almost ignored. Part of the reason for this discrepancy, according to Langewiesche, is racism, and the fact that the Estonia's victims were white, while in third world countries they are not. This is complete nonsense, and is nothing more than the author's bit of pandering to the gurus of political correctness, which seems to be de rigeur nowadays in every book from cheap novels to academic works. All it did for me was to cause me to treat the author with somewhat less respect than I had up to that point. The real reason is that people are naturally more interested in news from close to home. Anyone in Europe could have been on the Estonia the night she sank, but our chances of being on an overcrowded and undisciplined Congolese or Pakistani ferry would be pretty slim. Hence we are more interested in news that impinges on us close to home.

Overall, a decent read, but the Estonia incident does drag on a bit and more diversity on other aspects of chaos at sea would have been better. I'll give it two stars. I've read worse !


Good stories but trashy analysis, 23 Dec 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the 'al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational. For example, oil spills from tankers, which averaged 400,000 tonnes a year in the late 1970s, averaged 27,000 tonnes a year in the present decade - a reduction of over 93%. So how can anti-pollution laws have been "ineffectual", as one reviewer was led to believe?
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.


Gripping stories but trashy analysis, 24 Jun 2006
This book vividly reports on the unforgiving and brutal forces - both natural and man-made - to which those who take to the sea are exposed. It explores the murky politics of the world's oceans and brings us gripping, often tragic human stories from the sea. It takes in an extraordinary event of sophisticated piracy in the Strait of Malacca, reports on the appalling conditions of India's ship recycling trade and gives a minute-by-minute account of the sinking of the passenger ferry Estonia in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
It is well written, providing a gripping account of disasters and attacks that alarm as much as they inform. It also humanises the issues by relating specific events through the eyes of surviving witnesses and stories about some of those who died.
These stories are compellingly told and deserve to be widely read, but the subsequent analysis and conclusions are glib and shallow.
Langewiesche dismisses the entire body of maritime regulation as "a fantasy floating free of the realities at sea". This makes great rhetoric, but is devoid of any factual basis. Worse, he claims that ship registries are "rarely based in the countries whose names they carry", a claim that is simply false. If you want to speak to the man in charge of the UK register, his office is in Southampton. Panama, by far the world's largest register, is run from Panama City. The same is true for almost every register in the world, with only a handful of exceptions (Liberia and the Marshall Islands being the most notable).
He also claims, without presenting a shred of evidence, that the flag of convenience system is responsible for the return of piracy (a ludicrous suggestion) and for "the maritime form of the new, stateless terrorism" (which simply doesn't exist). Even that long-discredited tabloid fantasy, the `al-Qaeda navy', gets a serious mention.
In short, Langewiesche's analysis is characterised by a complete lack of serious research, and he almost always opts for lurid, shock-horror hyperbole when the facts are less sensational.
The Outlaw Sea has much to recommend it for its stories of human interest, and anyone who reads that part will learn much about the lives of the people who make globalisation possible. In fact, anyone wanting a brief introduction to the human side of the industry might not find anything better. But the subsequent analysis is hysterical, naïve and often plain wrong. With that huge caveat, I would still cautiously recommend it to readers who are prepared to keep their sense of scepticism close to hand.

Superb. Wild life in the oceans that makes up 3/4 of Earth, 07 Apr 2006
He writes very well, in a hard-bitten, American manner. Well-informed and endlessly fascinating. Will change your view about how life is lived by unconstrained humans. As Conrad and Melville show, in the pure lawless anarchy and freedom of the world's oceans one confronts often dark truths about humanity. The Outlaw Sea shows that this is as true today as ever. A must-read.

The Sea as a Scary Place, 12 Jan 2006
I really liked Langewiesche's previous book on the Sahara desert, and also have a minor fascination with modern piracy, so I grabbed this book as soon as I saw it. The six chapters function as semi-independent essays (bits of which appeared in The Atlantic), within an overall thesis that the world's oceans are essentially places of anarchy, and civilization exists only tenuously (at best) aboard seagoing vessels.

Chapter One introduces the reader to this anarchic world of flags of convenience, shadow ownership, holding companies, the cheapest crews money can buy, and unsafe, decrepit ships. This is done via the case of the Kristal, a 27-year-old tanker carrying molasses and a Croatian, Spanish, and Pakistani crew when it split in two and sank in off the coast of Spain in February 2001. The disaster is reconstructed from the testimony of the few survivors, and concludes with furtive settlements to them and an utter inability to determine who actually owned the ship. Through this, Langewiesche describes how most shipping is regulated by the International Marine Organization (a UN agency), and, rather depressingly, how -- despite all kinds of conventions, agreements, regulations, and inspections -- ships are constantly sinking at sea and lives are being lost.

Chapter Two is about security, both of ports and of ships. The vast majority of modern commercial piracy takes place near the Straights of Malacca, and Langewiesche takes the reader through one such case -- the October 1999 hijacking of the $10 million Japanese cargo ship Alondra Rainbow and its $10 million cargo of aluminum. Again, Langewiesche reconstructs the event through individual testimony and court records: from the Indonesian pirate leader's planning via cell phone with a Chinese boss, to the storming of the ship by multinational gang of Malays, Thais, Chinese, and others, to the ship's disappearance, and the pirates' eventual capture and prosecution by India. The disappearance is especially fascinating in this era of GPS and satellite imaging, and an important digression is made on the impossibility of tracking, never mind identifying all the ships at sea (some 30 million by one U.S. Coast Guard estimate). Anyone concerned about terrorists using boats or ports to deliver WMDs to the doorstep of the U.S. will probably not want to read this section, as it is rather chilling stuff.

The very brief third chapter provides a little more background on how international regulations work in practice, here in the case of oil spills. This first grew into a major concern following a series of incidents in the mid-1970s, and blossomed into a full political issue after the Exxon Valdez crash. Langewiesche shows how American and European bureaucracies have responded over the last several decades, and how ineffectual these new rules regulations have been.

Chapters four and five (totaling around 100 pages) deal with the September 1994 sinking of the ferry Estonia in rough Baltic waters, killing more than 850 people. And if you thought "The Perfect Storm" was heartbreaking, wait until you read this. The reconstruction (again, from survivors and the massive legal record) makes for terrifying reading, and no one who reads it will ever take a ride on a Baltic ferry. It's brilliant writing, tackling both the furious legal and technical debate about the cause of the disaster, and the harrowing human side, as people literally claw and climb over each other to survive. At times, the reconstruction gets a little too colorful as the attempts to show how most of the people become Darwinian animals get a bit much, but it's still nightmare-inducing stuff. It's an incredibly convoluted and contested tale, but one that does a very effective job of showing how the ocean can quickly reduce order to chaos and how the failure of regulation can lead to large tragedy.

The final chapter is somewhat tangential to the book's main thrust, as it deals with what happens to ships at the end of their lives rather than the chaos that rules the high seas. Here, Langewiesche covers the shipbreaking beach at Alang, India. Here, ships come to die, driven ashore and then manually broken down in scrap metal and salvageable parts by poorly paid crews who live in squalid work camps and are exposed to all manner of toxins from the dead ships. Various activist campaigns have brought world attention to the plight of these workers, but Langewiesche points out that shipbreaking is a booming field and even more wretched facilities exist elsewhere in South Asia. What the responsibility of shipbuilding nations is becomes a very murky matter and there are no easy answers.

This is a very good book, and each chapter stands on its own as an accessible introduction to one or two maritime topics which could easily merit entire books. Langewiesche is very good at blending travel reportage, investigative interviews, and archival research to create very compelling stories. Throughout, even though the topics can be rather abstract legally or technically arcane, he always writes with great compassion and clarity about the people who are affected.

Great for boaters, 15 Apr 2003
This guide was written to replace the old "Link House" book for those boating on the Thames, but also has useful information for walkers, cyclists and anglers. For those navigating the river it is most useful in the area of locks. If you intend stopping a lot you might want to supplement it with the Nicholson guide for more details of villages, pubs and other attractions.

The Author is a lockkeeper on the river - he may offer to sign it for you!

A solid Introduction, 24 May 2003
Ward provides a thorough introduction to the discipline of hydrology. He uses a variety of good examples to illustrate the new developments within the subject. His belief in the benefits of modelling hydrological processes are apparent throughout the book. The chapter on catchment hydrology of considerable merrit.

Hydro-amazing!, 03 Dec 1998
Definitely the 'Principle' book about hydrology.

Good basic book, 16 Feb 2004
A good basic introduction to global hydrology. The layout is good, with each chapter being divided up into many short, specific sections so it's very easy to find what you are looking for. Figures support the text well. A little expensive but it's probably a good investment.

The Bible, 21 May 2000
Elegant and comprehensive introduction to classical hydrogeology. Fetter's other book Contaminant Hydrogeology completes the pair. Unlike most scientific texts, this is an engrossing and highly engaging read - a real page turner. But remember, there is no money in hydrogeology in the UK...

A must for a small aquarist to the next generation ecologist, 02 Oct 2001
Limnology is a book that covers the whole deal in the lake and river ecossistems in a consise, didactic and scientificly correct way. The knowledge potential within it's covers is astonishing and shouldn't be ignored by anyone who wishes to thrive in the biology / ecology area. From basic water chemistry to nitrogen, phosphorus, iron, sulfur and silica cycles, from water microorganisms to land animals and plants and the interaction of all these factors, Limnology covers it all.
It's like a Nature-English dictionary.

This is the One, 11 Aug 2005
many others have written seemingly similar books since this one, but this is still the one you want It is well researched, authoritative and is exactly what it says in the subtitle. Most other books cover part of the same ground and give the impression of being edited highlights of this one.
If you've ever wondered what was here before the metropolis, why certain streets are the shapes they are, why Pont Street is called that (the French for "bridge") or what that strange large pipe is over your head in Sloane square tube station - look no further!

A seminal London text, 15 Jul 2003
A fantastically-researched account of the buried tributaries of the Thames. Comes with old illustrations, photos and a beautiful pull-out sketch map of the routes of some of these lost streams. Guaranteed to get you out and about in London.

The essentials of Groundwater, 17 Sep 2002
Reccommended to me as part of my university course - and was actually useful! Very easy to read and the chapters appear in a logical order so you can read from the front to the back and know whats going on.
The pictures are relevant and easy to understand and reference to the text.
The explanations given in the book, though not overtly complex, were detailed enough to write a good basic essay with a few points expanded on in detail. My only criticism is that there was perhaps not enough content on the actual chemistry of groundwater and what there was, was very simple.

Interesting, But Too Much Time Spent On The Estonia Story, 08 Feb 2007
This is an interesting book in some respects, which highlights the modern dangers of the sea. Most shore dwellers have romantic notions about the sea and seafarers, which are quite erroneous. Seamen are just people doing a job like anyone else, the difference being that they live in the factory instead of commuting there every day after staying in their own homes. Another difference is that the factory travels around the world, and that it moves quite a lot under your feet when the weather is bad ! Try to imagine having to work in your office or factory floor while an earthquake is going on. The sea can be a harsh mistress, but for some people she provides a decent, although precarious, living. I know - I am a seafarer myself. Others are not so lucky, and this book makes the point, describing the mayhem that can sometimes happen. Pirates are not comic Johnny Depp characters, nor are they armed with cutlasses any more. They are vicious, sometimes murderous, criminals often armed nowadays with rocket propelled grenades and automatic rifles. The book also gives some insight into modern piracy.

If I have any criticism of the book, it has to be that the author spent far too much time dealing with the loss of the ferry "Estonia" which sank in the Baltic Sea with massive loss of life. It seemed to me that the book was written as an excuse to go into minute detail about this incident.

Another criticism has to be the introduction, at one point, of the nowadays obligatory politically correct statement which is completely off the mark. On one page he highlights the fact that the loss of the Estonia provoked many pages of news in the Western press, while ferry disasters in third world countries were almost ignored. Part of the reason for this discrepancy, according to Langewiesche, is racism, and the fact that the Estonia's victims were white, while in third world countries they are not. This is complete nonsense, and is nothing more than the author's bit of pandering to the gurus of political correctness, which seems to be de rigeur nowadays in every book from cheap novels to academic works. All it did for me was to cause me to treat the author with somewhat less respect than I had up to that point. The real reason is that people are naturally more interested in news from close to home. Anyone in Europe could have been on the Estonia th