Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America's Cruise-Ship Empires

by Kristoffer Garin

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670034185
• ISBN13: 9780670034185
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

One of the all-time best business case studies

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.

Set sail with a great read!

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.

I really liked this book about cruise ships

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.

Fascinating

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.

Analysis of an Unusual Industry

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.