Men's Lives - An Oily Memoir
By Eric T. Wiberg
Due in Paperpack June, 2010
With the volatility of the oil market and the impact of its high retail cost
on consumers around the world, the market is ideal right now for a
behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage is made. To some extent this is an
expose a-la “The Dirty Bits” about how a publicly-listed, NASDAQ certified
firm bought old tankers wholesale, sent them out to the Far East, told them
“don’t come back” (as in excluded them from trade in the US or Europe), and
ran them until they blew up, sank, or were scrapped. The philosophy of ‘buy
‘em cheap, trade ‘em hard, and if there is anything left, sell it’,
prevailed.
During the author’s three years of tanker safety vetting and operations, 3
of the nine tankers on his watch didn’t even make it to the scrap yard – one
sank and was towed up a river in China, another blew up off India and was
towed to an Arabian repair yard, and a third was pushed so far aground in
India that it was still there – with a lonely captain standing watch –
months later.
This is a fast-paced, first-hand narrative by the author of nearly a dozen
books about the dizzying, exciting years trying to keep up with the mishaps,
the international fund wires, the various dubious third parties – in
Indonesia, the Koreas, Bermuda, India and Indonesia that we funded to grease
the machinery. It is one man’s view of how oil reaches consumer’s oil tanks,
scented, artificially colored, and priced to the maximum. This narrative
sheds some light on only one aspect – the seaborne transportation link – of
an extraordinary story of oil going from mud to market.
See www.menslives.info and www.ericwiberg.com
