Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America's Cruise-Ship Empires |  | Author: Kristoffer A. Garin
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Seller: bay-city-books
Rating:  32 reviews
Sales Rank: 774,111
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.4
ISBN: 0670034185
Dewey Decimal Number: 387.5420973
EAN: 9780670034185
ASIN: 0670034185
Publication Date: June 23, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Left for dead after the advent of cheap, reliable air travel forty years ago, cruise shipping in the decades since has been reborn as a $12 billion industry on the cutting edge of twenty-first century global capitalism. Today, nearly ten million Americans take cruises each year, sailing to exotic destinations on floating cities that can cost upwards of $600 million each to construct. In this terrifically entertaining history, Kristoffer A. Garin chronicles the industrys rise from humble and comic beginnings in the early sixties through waterfront corruption and the incalculably huge impact of the hit television series The Love Boat in the seventies and eighties to the recent consolidation wars. Entrepreneurial genius and bareknuckle capitalism mate with cultural kitsch as the cruise lines dodge U.S. tax, labor, and environmental laws to make unimaginable profits while bringing the world a new form of leisure. Few businesses in America today are as colorful, lucrative, and innovative as cruise shipping, and Devils on the Deep Blue Sea is the first book to give readers a compelling behind-the-scenes look into these floating empires and the modern-day robber barons who shaped them.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
 One of the all-time best business case studies January 3, 2006
BuzS (ny, ny)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
I cannot say enough about the strong points of this book. Garin would have earned much praise for simply recounting the history of Carnival's extraordinarily rapid conquest of the global cruise industry -- earning founder Ted Arison at his death the title of 'world's richest Jew' and leaving son Micky at the helm of a company that took just over 25 years from its 1971 birth to reach annual profits of $1 billion. Beyond Garin's entertaining story of how the Arisons created both an industry and a fortune, there is so much more to this book: it's a wonderful social history of American vacationing and travel rituals and preferences; a tale of entrerpreneurial takeovers and strategizing every bit as intriguing as 'Barbarians at the Gate'; an investigation of corporate corner-cutting in the labor, environmental, tax, and other regulatory fields as eye-opening as 'Silent Spring'; WildWest-style episodes of mutinous crews and commando-led cruise-ship rescue operations; marketing coups and blunders; the impact of TV's 'LoveBoat' series; along with Caribbean cultural and economic lore from Bob Marley to CARICOM (the island nations' version of the EU). This massive reporting effort is wonderfully well-organized and unfailingly pleasurable to read.
Fascinating July 17, 2005
BMK (Phila. Pa.)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
I have never been on a cruise nor had I seriously considered going on one. However, I found this book very well researched , fascinating,and at times truely exciting. It is extremely well written and flows like an engrossing novel.I not only learned about the cruise ship industry,specifically,but also about the world of big business,deal making,etc. This book really gave me a new,broader, understanding of what motivates successfull business leaders-and it left a lasting impression about cruising.
I may even take a cruise.I highly recommend this book.
I really liked this book about cruise ships July 28, 2005
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
My family has taken me on cruises every year since I was five, so I know a lot about ships. I'm 12 now, and I've been on Carnival, Celebrity, Royal Caribbean, Disney and Windstar. My father bought this book and said it was really good, so when he finished it, I read it too. I love to read, and it was challenging to read sometimes but not as much as I thought, and I really liked it because it told about a lot of secret things that happen on the ships. There was some stuff about business that I skipped over this, but maybe I will read that later when I'm older. In my opinion it was still fun and my dad and I will watch out for a lot of new things when we go on a princess ship this december.
Set sail with a great read! December 30, 2005
Edward J. Resnick (Providence, RI United States)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Extremely well written history and analysis of the cruise industry. This book covers not only how the industry developed but looks into the personalities of the people that created it and the impact cruise ships have on society. Even if you are not a big cruise fan, this is a great business book, but if you are a cruise fan, it is a must read.
Analysis of an Unusual Industry July 7, 2005
John Matlock (Winnemucca, NV)
13 out of 19 found this review helpful
The cruise ship industry is a masterpiece of deliberate confusion. The maritime laws have been developed over centuries of agreements between countries. The cruise ship operators have very carefully looked at the overall situation with a view to minimizing their costs.
The ships are built in shipyards where government subsidies reduce the cost of building the ships. If the government of France wants to tax its citizens to pay part of the cost of building the ships, why should the cruise companies object.
The ships are licensed in countries offering "Flags of Convenience." If it costs a few thousand dollars to 'flag' the ship as Liberian, and a few hundred times that to flag it as American, well, that's a pretty easy decision as well.
And if it's a foreign ship, then it doesn't have to abide by U.S. minimum wage laws, safety requirements, etc. The dish washer can be any nationality that you can hire at the lowest possible price.
Sure the U.S. politicians can get involved, pass a law about ships leaving and returning to the same port, i.e. if you leave from Miami and return to Miami then the ship must be U.S. flagged, U.S. crewed, U.S. polution law compliant, etc.
This though would dramatically raise the cost of a cruise, and people wouldn't like that. It might also mean that the cruise would start/end in Nassau or some place like that.
It's fascinating to see what the cruise ship companies have done to create the idea of an ocean voyage that goes basically nowhere. It makes you wonder if cruises between New York and London wouldn't make sense. Then we could redo the kind of travel that the airlines put out of business back in the '50's. Hey, the SS United States is (last I heard) tied up in Philadelphia and is probably for sale.
Of course cruising the North Atlantic in winter is different than the Caribbean.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 32
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