Looking for a Ship

i have read most of his books and you can't go wrong with any of them. one of america's best expository writers whose books have largely gone out of print. his first book, THE HEADMASTER, is what launched his career. he has a talent for going very deep and taking you along effortlessly. toward the end, he reveals the many nuggets that were hidden previously.

I've resisted reviewing this for many years but upon re-reading it, I've got to confirm this is not one of McPhee's best. I know this is blasphemy. McPhee is one of my heroes. But he's sort of done the impossible and made the merchant marine boring and -- for a guy who generally sets the gold standard on facts -- he gets some things very wrong. It sounds nit-pickish, but not for an author who went back and measured the distance of Bill Bradley's hoop to the ground. The Marine Electric, for example, did not take 11 days to travel from Norfolk to Boston -- which any fact checker at The New Yorker or just plain common sense should tell him. And yeah, people have a decent enough idea what happened to the Poet -- an old junker of a vessel -- and a piece of the life ring washed up in Spain. There are way too many instances of him letting sea-tales pass as fact, and making broad assumptions stated as fact. There are far fewer alcoholics in the merchant marine in 1990 than during Vietnam? Really. Maybe so. Maybe not. This information is just delivered ex cathedra.More seriously, he does not seem to really grasp the business of shipping and predicted that the merchant marine would disappear sometime in the 1990's -- replaced by the Soviets, a breath-takingly short-sighted view in 1990-1991 when the empire was crumbling.Look, the guy is a first rate author on "hard science" ops. Where it comes to "softer subjects," he really just does not do well. He is able to tell us the birth date of every man on this ship (should we want to know that) but never really captures any hearts and souls in a business that is largely heart and soul. As the old song says, "Oh, you know all the words, and you sung all the notes,But you never quite learned the song, she sang." McPhee is a master of many subjects and tales. Not here.

This book reminded me a lot of one of my all-time favorites, "Travels With Charlie" by Steinbeck. McPhee's writing style, and his ability to describe in an interesting way the lives of ordinary people, was very similar to Steinbeck's book. Granted, I have always been a sucker for books about life at sea, but I highly recommend this to anyone who would like to learn about an industry upon which we all so heavily depend, whether we know it or not.The book is set on a voyage from Charleston to Valparaiso, Chile and back through the Panama Canal. The author becomes a "P.A.C." (or "Passenger in Addition to Crew") on a container ship on which his friend, Andy, is a Mate. The book begins with Andy waiting in a union hall in Charleston hoping to land a job on a ship, which gives you a very interesting insight to the recent (book published in 1990) decline in the American merchant marine industry. The author and his friend find a job aboard the Stella Lykes headed for South America, and encounter many interesting situations, such as pirates, mechanical problems, and incompetent pilots, not to mention a host of interesting crew members. Interspersed in these stories are many interesting passages about the merchant marine industry in general, which I found fascinating.Some of the reviewers criticized the book for not having a set plot or being disjointed. While it is true that the story is not always presented in chronological order, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's style of bouncing around in time to relate a point. Nor does the story have a climactic plot, but that is not really the point of the book. It is simply a well-written story of one person's experience on a 42-day trip.

This is a most readable account of a trip aboard a tramp steamer belonging to America's rapidly-shrinking merchant navy. The author, obviously, won the confidences of many of his shipboard companions and there are some sharply-drawn characters in his story. One cannot but warm to the character and personality of the skipper Captain Paul Washburn, a great-grand father, and most uncomfortable thinking about his pending retirement.I thoroughly enjoyed this read.

Following WWII the American merchant marine was downsized almost to oblivion. Shipowners found that ships could be built and crewed more cheaply by constructing in overseas yards, hiring third world seamen, and registering in other countries. such as Liberia and Panama. By 1955, when I investigated the possibility of a seagoing occupation, there were few jobs, and the hundreds of downsized but experienced American seamen were more than enough to fill the available deck and engineroom berths. McPhee stays away from finding cause for the situation and just tells it like it is. Although the book is aimed at a narrow audience, it makes the situation of finding a maritime job as real as it can get on paper. Since there are few non-fiction, modern era books covering this topic, readers wanting more on the legal and regulatory environment might find the "American Merchant Seaman's Manual", published by Cornell Maritime Press, of interest. Those interested also in inland towboat operations will enjoy the chapter on that subject in McPhee's "Uncommon Carriers".

This is a Mcphee work, exhaustively researched, and written for smooth, easy reading. Mr. Mcphee can make a freighter's cargo list into a fun five minutes- only he can do this. The ending is unusual, but may e it is a comment on the situation concerning the US merchant marine service. A wonderful book.

A great diary and description of life in the American Merchant Marine, speaks to anyone who has an interest in how the world has changed at sea.

Beautifully written books, I like all of John McPhee's books.

As with all of his books, easy, entertaining, insightful well written.