Name: Looking for a ship
ISBN: 9781560541028

Looking for a ship

This is an extraordinary tale of life on the high seas aboard one of the last American merchant ships, the S.S. Stella Lykes, on a forty-two-day journey from Charleston down the Pacific coast of South America. As the crew of the Stella Lykes makes their ocean voyage, they tell stories of other runs and other ships, tales of disaster, stupidity, greed, generosity, and courage.

What Hacker News says

kraussvonespySep 2023

McPhee is truly a national treasure. If you're interested, that article was one of several published in his book Uncommon Carriers which includes a train and river barge voyage. Looking for a Ship is also great as it follows a merchant marine through various stages of that job.

The Curve of Binding Energy is a fascinating study of Theodore Taylor, the engineer behind the smallest nuke warhead in the world, and his concerns that terrorists may be able to build warheads themselves.

Pretty much any McPhee book or article is fascinating. His book Oranges is all about farming oranges, processing orange juice so it can sit in refrigerated vats for months (and how it is reconstituted through "flavor packs" that give it back the OJ flavors after long storage) and all kind of other orange stories. No matter what rabbit hole McPhee jumps down, his research and writing are nothing short of engrossing.

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wmoserDec 2020

Since you called out working on a container ship, a lot of these have a nautical bent but that’s an area of my personal interest as well.

Looking for a ship, John McPhee, Book about a sailor looking for work and eventually catching a ship.

Born A Crime, Trevor Noah, not about another career but Apertheid South Africa, I enjoyed it and wished I would have read it before traveling through S.A. For work.

Don’t Tell mum I work on the rigs, she thinks I’m a piano player in a whorehouse, by Paul Carter, read this one awhile ago but it’s about an oil well driller. The industry has changed quite a bit since this book was written but I remember really enjoying it.

Salvage: a personal odyssey by Ian Tew. I enjoyed this book about a a salvage master out of Singapore

The ride of a lifetime by Robert Iger, book about Iger’s journey to being CEO of Walt Disney Company. A bit of insight to what the company executives are doing/ supposed to be doing?

Quench Your Own Thirst, Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer company. He discusses some of the mistakes he made along the way too.

Good clean fun, Nick offerman

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mjhoyAug 2014

I was about to post about John McPhee, too, when I saw your comment. Excellent book, recommended.

Somewhat related, also great: Looking for a Ship.

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karaterobotSep 2023

I just finished Looking for a Ship a few weeks ago. I have read Oranges as well, and Annals of the Former World, and some of his shorter pieces in a Best Of collection. I am hit and miss on his writing, but when it hits, it hits hard for me.

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a3nSep 2017

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html

> McPhee sat down at his computer and clicked around. Green text appeared on a black screen. That was all: green text. No icons, rulers, or scrollbars.

> McPhee began to type in command lines.

  x coded.*

  dir coded.*

  x coded-10.tff

  x coded-16.tff

> Up came portions of his book “The Founding Fish.” He typed in further commands, and hunks of green text went blinking around: a complete inventory of his published articles; his 1990 book, “Looking for a Ship.”

> I felt as if I were in a computer museum, watching the curator take his favorite oddity for a spin. McPhee has never used a traditional word processor in his life. He is one of the world’s few remaining users of a program called Kedit, which he writes about, at great length, in “Draft No. 4.” Kedit was created in the 1980s and then tailored, by a friendly Princeton programmer, to fit McPhee’s elaborate writing process.

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