The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

An Amazon Best Book of August 2019: It’s becoming harder to disappear on this increasingly connected, overpopulated planet, so if you're feeling hemmed in, maybe you should buy a boat. Three-fifths of the planet is covered in water, an expanse so vast that anyone can seemingly get away with anything without consequence. The high seas have always been where the illicit action is, and Ian Urbina—a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist—took to the waves to find it. And did he ever. Urbina traveled the globe on a risky mission, hopping boats to amass a catalog of just about every contemptible human activity imaginable. Smugglers, traffickers, pirates, poachers, stowaways, mercenaries, and polluters fill The Outlaw Ocean’s more than 400 pages, and the theme is overwhelming, often catastrophic degradation: of people, the environment, borders, and the rule of law (or at least its illusion). In the frigid waters of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean, Urbina boards a vigilante vessel on a months-long, slow-burn chase of a notorious fish-poaching operation. In the seaside brothels of Thailand, trafficked prostitutes attract young men who are themselves consigned as slave labor on fishing boats. Armies of private “security” forces kill time aboard floating armories, waiting for their next unofficial deployments. These crimes may seem isolated and remote—drops in the ocean, so to speak—but they don’t occur in a vacuum, or for nothing; they support choices made every day in government, in commerce, and in our homes. The Outlaw Ocean is illuminating, terrifying, and often dismaying. It’s also unique, vitally important, and strangely thrilling. —Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review