I came into this book hoping to learn something. Instead, I got a few Atlantic articles, welded together about as soundly as the rusting ships the author describes. Spoiler alert, all the ships sink.
I suppose I learned that in a ship that is overturning, it’s important to pick the right staircase and get to the balcony as fast as possible, but I didn’t learn much about shipping, maritime safety, piracy etc.
The author takes a few notable episodes of accidents or piracy and tries to string these together into a portrait of the oceans as a vast untamed expanse of the globe, but never sets any context either across history or for ships that don’t sink or get hijacked. I should have stayed away.