Terror auf See: Moderne Piraten rüsten auf

Burnett's book, based on his own experience being boarded while alone on his sailboat, and then investigating the world of modern piracy aboard an oil tanker and an even larger VLCC, is informative and sufficently frightening. Shipping comes across as an AMAZINGLY weak link in global economic (and ecological) security as gangs of pirates equipped with speedboats, bamboo, and machetes apparently have no difficulty boarding and hijacking even the largest of ships without fear of prosecution.The weakness of Burnett's prose is in trying to preserve a sense of naivete with the reader. It gets a little old the twentieth time or so that he repeats his mantra. When he's in the thick of telling stories the pace quickens, but when he ruminates my interest drops like an anchor.

This is an informative story about modern piracy. He tells a number of piracy stories, including for example an attack on his own personal boat. Piracy is apparently quite common, particularly in international waters but also off the Indonesian coast, where the military is corrupt. The purpose of the book is to warn of the possibility of a VLCC (very large crude carrier) being hijacked and crashed in the Malacca Straits between Malaysia and Indonesia, causing an environmental catastrophe and possibly closing the straits to shipping. A VLCC, the Chaumont, was pirated in 1999, and steamed without control through the narrowest passage in the Straits for over half an hour, but miraculously avoided any collision. He describes- the piracy of his personal boat- a trip he took on a vulnerable VLCC from the Middle East to Singapore- a trip he took on a crude carrier from Singapore across the South China Sea, where pirates scout his ship out- the Indonesians' reluctant recapture of a hijacked oil ship during an international antipiracy conference- the piracy and near disaster of the Valiant Carrier- a tour of Malaysian antipiracy efforts- the deadly crash between the container ship Ocean Blessing and the oil tanker Nagasaki Spirit; it is thought that both ships were rudderless at the time because of pirates- he speaks a little about organized crime and terrorist organizations, but mostly pirates in the Malacca Straits are loosely organized localsThe book is fairly well-written, although occasionally drily repetitive. (Langewiesche, the Atlantic Monthly journalist, has another recent book with a looser focus on the same subject.)