The Box
I started this book late last year (Dec 2024) and it took me almost a year to finish because the topic was dense and the author kept switching between the areas I was interested in (such as the invention of the container, what problems the containers originally had to solve, what problems it ran into, and how ultimately it was solved to become the global standard in shipping) and areas I wasn’t interested in (such as longshore labor and the shenanigans that it took for them to be fairly compensated for the introduction of mechanized labor).
i should be fair to the author, its not exactly a bait and switch since the subtitle mentions world economy and you can’t talk about world economy without its impact on the people that the box obviously impacted. Its just that I felt that the details given to the invention of the container was given relatively short shrift compared to what felt like half the book about the labor union and what each port did on the east coast when it came to containerization of the shipping business.
its all relevant, its just that the union labor parts were much less interesting I guess.
The other parts that I was interested in of the book was the parts about ships. And how the trade went from using surplus ships made during WW2 to becoming the gigantic behemoths today. To go with that, how the entire shipping industry has changed and how all this has impacted the costs of shipping. Great detail goes into how the pacific trade began and why Europe embraced containerization relatively quickly.
All in all, I think the book is quite good and probably would be better if it focused only on the containers and the ships, but of course, we can’t talk economy without people, but it always felt like the people were more of a distraction than anything else.
I don’t regret reading this book, I just wish it could have maintained its interesting parts more consistently. Have to say, if you’re into logistics at all, this book is probably a must read.
I’ll give this a recommend in spite of the star rating. =)