Fire on the Horizon

February 7, 2011
Konrad, a veteran oil rig captain, teams up with Shroder (Old Souls) to offer a thorough but plodding look at the "little-understood culture of offshore drilling." Starting in Korea with the construction of the Deepwater Horizon in 2000, the authors leapfrog through time and around the globe to explain the history and mechanics of oil rig life and offshore drilling. Profiles of the (mostly) men who work the rigs shed light on the class tensions aboard as well as on the personalities, educations, and customs of this special set of modern-day mariners. Konrad had close friends on the Horizon and the final chapters are an affecting blend of their firsthand accounts of the explosion. The authors suggest that oil rig blowouts are inevitable: while Transocean Ltd., owner of the Horizon and the world's biggest offshore drilling company, does what it can to prevent common safety hazards, the high cost of delays in the offshore oil business (use of the Horizon was costing BP $700 a minute) encourages management to postpone the maintenance of essential equipment. While informative and undeniably important, the book is so bogged down by clunky prose and jargon that it's difficult to mine its message. (Apr.)
C
reating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
Martha Nussbaum
Harvard Univ., $22.95 (228p) ISBN 978-0-674-05054-9
Offering a forceful and persuasive account of the failings of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an accurate reflection of human welfare, the distinguished philosopher Nussbaum (Frontiers of Justice) provides a framework for a new account of global development based on the concept of capabilities. Taking her cue from the work of economist Amartya Sen, the author argues that human development is best measured in terms of specific opportunities available to individuals rather than economic growth figures. Nussbaum strives to provide a comprehensive practical and theoretical framework by linking capabilities with education, human rights, justice, and democracy. Placing this approach within a broad lineage that reaches back to Aristotle, Nussbaum makes a strong case both for its philosophical pedigree and its ability to deal with such contemporary issues as gender equality and animal rights. Though the complexity of questions raised would seem to demand a more detailed account of how the capabilities approach might be implemented, as an introduction to the issues and as an indictment of current development indexes, this small book provides a strong foundation for beginning to think about how economic growth and individual flourishing might coincide.

February 1, 2011

With the assistance of former Washington Post contributor Shroder (Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence For Past Lives, 1999), veteran oil-rig captain Konrad guides readers through the culture and daily life of offshore drilling on the Deepwater Horizon.

Konrad worked seven years for Transocean, the owner of Horizon, which exploded into flames in April 2010, taking 11 lives and leaking more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. He comes at the story from the perspective of the people who do the work to get the oil. In so doing, he provides a complementary angle on the event to Carl Safina's A Sea in Flames (2011), with its emphasis on corporate malfeasance and the blowout's social and environmental impacts. First, Konrad introduces the Horizon, which, even in its outdated state, was an awesome construction, a floating drilling platform the size of an office park, with computer-controlled dynamic positioning that could keep it over a 20-square-foot target a mile under the surface of the ocean. Konrad writes of the rig with easy familiarity, while comfortably populating it with its maritime and drilling crews and warmly conveying the camaraderie that suffused the platform. Though the author comes from a maritime background, he turns the drilling process into a fine choreography, offering an effective critique of the corporate edicts that jeopardized the safety of the rig's people and the integrity of the exploratory well. The corporate atmosphere was complex, however—one moment finds Transocean working hard to avoid common-hazard injuries, then cutting back on crew just when the aging rig needed them most for preventative maintenance. Konrad's gavel comes down on corporate irresponsibility, and the consequences of the poor, indeed criminal, decision making is palpably, gruesomely expressed as the author screws down his focus to the last few days of the Horizon, concentrating on a few individuals in an absorbing re-creation of the disaster's brewing, mayhem and horror.

A lucid investigation into the fatally risky business that caused the blowout, which, by putting human faces on many players, amplifies the ache.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

November 15, 2010

This is a real insider's view of the BP spill. A veteran oil-rig captain, Konrad was a longtime employee of TransOcean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon, and knew many of the crewmembers personally. His one-on-ones with the crew here meld with former Washington Post editor/writer Shroder's reporting. The argument: there's a particular culture on an offshore oil rig that made it inevitable.

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2011
Several extant and forthcoming titles about the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico dwell on environmental or regulatory aspects of the incident. Konrad and Shroders differs from them by narrating the catastrophe as an industrial accident. Before describing the fateful moment when explosion and fire destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the authors cover the Horizons construction and the backgrounds of several personnel who were on board when it blewsome, graduates of East Coast maritime colleges; others, working-class southerners making big money on oil rigs. Allusions to this distinction of statuses are woven throughout an account of the intricate technologies and processes of deep-sea oil drilling, in which controlling well pressure is critical. Recounting an ominous sequence of questionable operational decisions that immediately preceded the conflagration, the book crests with a frantic evacuation and the tally of the killed and injured. Former rig captain Konrad and journalist Shroders effort should gratify readers interested in the oil-rig world and in the Horizons crew.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)