Crewshiplife: or, the Love boat

Behold, the story of a hotel manager whose steady gal runs away to university and leaves him heartbroken. Ready for a change, he applies for a position on a cruise ship as a junior assistant purser, and delivers a memoir regaling us with a play-by-play of his social life, of nights spent dancing, drinking, and going to bed with similarly emotionally wrecked and lonely young people who stumble from hangover to hangover. The book is largely about their chain of using one another, nights of dancing, drunken hook-ups, and days of working as clerks and continually answering the same questions from those swinish masses, the customers. It's just like passengers to wreck what seems to be a college keg party afloat in uniform.

There is very little information in here about the actual operation of a cruise ship, merely the training experience of one fellow who devotes far more page space to his dating play-by-plays than to what duties he was actually performing on the ship.  I'm sure he's a nice guy, and I feel bad for not liking his book, but..seriously, it'a s chronicle of dating. If I want that, I can listen to Taylor Swift.


(Amazon recommended this to me after reading Cargo Ship Diaries...which was mostly about one man chasing skirts throughout Eurasia. Guess I should have seen that coming, but both were read via through a free trial of Kindle Unlimited.)

Oil on the Brain

Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Journey to Your Tank

© 2007 Lisa Magonelli

336 pages

Every moment, oil is surging up wells, being chemically sorted in vast refineries, sloshing its way across continents in pipelines, and being dispersed throughout the country in trucks to keep over three hundred million Americans mobile. The same  miracle is effected in other nations across the globe. In Petroleum on the Brain, Lisa Margonelli begins at her local gas station and backtracks the supply line – riding with truckers, touring refineries, standing in the pit of oil exchanges,  and filling her hands with ancient dirt that hasn’t seen sunlight in millions of years at the edge of a drilling operation.  Although beginning with the American market,  Margonelli’s travels take on a geopolitical message as she scrutinizes oil’s role in the destabilization of Africa and the middle east, and looks to the future in China.   Although slightly dated (researched and written  in 2004-2005),   the majority of the book’s information remains relevant, and  is delivered in humorous style.  Petroleum brims over with personality, as Margonelli connects with lives across the globe,  and demonstrates through her travels how our lives, too, are knit together with those whose livelihood

Although gas stations are where most consumers of  gasoline/petrol enter the market, and absorb the scorn of disgruntled drivers who see the price continuing to climb,  the seemingly ubiquitous c-stations are the low men on the supply line, in control of nothing and making only a marginal profit on their gasoline during the best days. As witnessed by Margonelli as she spies fleets of trucks from different companies pulling up to the same pipelines,   gasoline sold in the United States is fairly uniform. Some companies add a detergent, but pricing varies more depending on the location and the market than the product.  Given how much oil is being produced, refined, shipped, and sold every hour, the pace of activity becomes frenetic as Margonelli travels further up the supply line, encountering harried supply dispatchers and middlemen.  Although her book is about the oil industry, it's a personal encounter with time invested in relationships on Margonelli's part. For her, the gas station owner, the driver, the genius wildcatter in Texas -- they are men and women of passion and intelligence, whose story is bound up with their profession.

Its beginnings scratch idle curiosity as to how the petroleum industry works, but Margonelli spends more time researching, her text develops broader appeal, examining the role oil plays in U.S. foreign policy.  Here the book threatens to show its age: having virtually exhausted its home reservoirs of oil, she writes that the United States has to secure new supplies across the world, and to that end has been involved in a series of wars, directly or indirectly. A chapter on Iran sees her chat with both American sailors and Iranian oilmen regarding an incident during the Iraq-Iran war, in which half the Iranian navy was sunk by an American fleet despite the United States’ official non-combatant status.  Magonelli also visits petro-states in South America and Africa, where corruption is apparently immortal;  some of the tribal warfare in sub-Saharan Africa has its roots in villages receiving unequal shares of the loot when oil companies discovered their untapped potential.   Ultimately, Magonelli believes we must look beyond petroleum, to cleaner and less volatile energy sources. In her final chapter, the story moves to China, where a then-ascendant economy was not only gobbling up goal, but dumping money into clean energy programs in the hopes of expanding China’s consumer fleet while not further destroying what little clean air remains.

The oil market has continued to evolve in the ten years since this book was originally, first doubling the highest price marked in her original next and then falling beneath it. The United States has become again (however temporarily) a net oil exporter, thanks to technological advices that make extracting oil in harder to reach places easier.  Oil's votility underscores its continuing importance to the world economy and political dramas;  in the middle east, the swinish mob that is ISIS finances itself  partially through the oil market.  Given that oil won't be bowing out to competition anytime soon, learning its cost and vagaries is utterly helpful for citizens of any country, and Magonelli's account offers entertainment value to boot. 

Related:

• Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee
• Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet,  Michael Klare
• Coal: A Human History, Barbara Freese

50 Jobs in 50 States

50 Jobs in 50 States: One Man's Journey of Discovery Across America
© 2011 Daniel Seddiqui
275 pages

Disclaimer: I read from an advanced review copy of the book, available through NetGalleys. No compensation for a review, good or negative, was offered or requested, aside from my own potential enjoyment of the book.


Frustrated and crushed by scores of failed job interviews, author Daniel Seddiqui felt like an utter loser. After breaking down in the parking lot of his local Macy's -- after returning the suit he bought for one such interview -- this athlete-turned-volunteer coach decided to pursue a dream, to 'live the map' of America by travelling throughout the continent and working a job in every state. With the support of his pseudo-girlfriend Sasha and a network of family and friends throughout the country, Daniel hid the road, determined to experience each state's most signature job for a week.

The trip starts out fairly mundane -- preparing care packages in a Mormon humanitarian office -- but future states bring more sensational opportunities, like serving stock cars at the Indy 500, serving drinks during New Orleans' Mardi Gras, and giving Hawaiian tourists surfing lessons. North America's wealth in natural resources creates a wide variety of jobs, and Seddiqui seems to have gotten his hands dirty by engaging in most of them -- meatpacking, farming,  mining, and logging all feature.  Aside from a streak of agricultural jobs (broken when he decides to sell real estate in Idaho instead of farming potatoes),  Seddiqui is able to find vastly different work every week: at one point, he transitions from modeling in North Carolina to coal mining in West Virginia.  His effort to find every state's most culturally significant job is generally successful (cheese-making in Wisconsin, working with automobiles in Michigan), though there are surprises along the way. Seddiqui sometimes chose jobs slightly off the mark out of necessity (Sorry, Daniel, you can't show up at Fenway Park and play for the Red Sox), but most of his fifty choices seemed appropriate. There's overlap between his and Stephen Fry's choices:  when the British journalist visited each of the U.S.'s fifty states, he sometimes participated in that state's most prominent job: both men realized that lobstering in Maine is far beyond their endurance level, both descend into West Virginia's coal mines, and both participated in political rallies in New Hampshire (Seddequi makes "Obama Cares" posters and manages to slip a complimentary note to the president without being tackled and manhandled by the Secret Service, quite a feat given his partial Afghan heritage that had him mistaken as an illegal immigrant while in Arizona).

Seddequi's account is certainly readable: I read the book in a single sitting, and found him generally pleasant traveling companion. His tone is informal and conversational, perhaps overly so --for at times he makes comments about people that seem inappropriate in this context. His deteriorating relationship with Sasha (which ends for good when he is in Arkansas doing excavation work and heartily agrees with graffiti that reads "Sasha Sucks") gives the reader an idea of his emotional difficulties, He also makes comments about the girls he tries to date while on the road, which strikes me as entirely out of place.  Aside from this, however, he was an agreeable host. While the book ends with a brief chapter about lessons he learned on the road and appears to be targeted as inspirational, I enjoyed it more for the occupational accounts. I learned much about some of the best and worst jobs in the United States, and his tales of on-the-road hospitality are heartening.

50 Jobs in 50 States will be available from Berrett-Koehler on 15 March 2011.

Related:

• Fifty Jobs, the book's official website.
• "Living the Map", the author's website -- a name he trademarked while working as an incorporation specialist in Delaware.
• Stephen Fry in America, Stephen Fry