Container ships are the pack mules of the global marketplace. Their role is crucial, if unglamorous, and Pollak's exceptional piece of literary journalism should make readers appreciate the mostly monotonous, sometimes dangerous work of these ships and their crews. Pollak arranged to board the Colombo Bay
on one of its regular westbound trips out of Hong Kong in the fall of 2001. The ship's five-week itinerary included calls at several ports in South Asia before passage through the Suez Canal, across the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic to New York. Pollak, a contributing editor at the Nation
, learned of the 9/11 attacks just before he boarded and considered canceling his trip, but he and the ship sailed on. Had he held exclusively to a first-person travelogue, Pollak still might have produced a worthy book, but to his readers' benefit, he weaves in profiles of the officers and crew, facts about the history of merchant shipping since antiquity and lore about the romance of seafaring from Conrad and Melville. Many of the ports and passages (Singapore; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Aden, Yemen) already had a history with ships, pirates, smuggling and terrorism. Because the ship sailed so soon after 9/11, the calls at these ports were anything but routine, allowing Pollak to convey with greater urgency both the vitality and vulnerability of cargo shipping. To balance the somber realities, there are irony and humor, not to mention technical descriptions and analysis to rival the best of John McPhee. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. (Jan. 15)
Forecast:
The front-of-galley comparisons to Tracy Kidder and Paul Theroux are deserved. Although container shipping isn't the most glamorous of subjects, this book has the chance to become a sleeper hit, aided by Pollak's terrific writing and connection to the
Nation.
