Fascinating Topic sometimes lost in minutiae

What did you love best about The Box?

The author did the best he could with a very technical topic. He started quite strong, with images of how society before the container moved goods and what waterfront life looked like. But throughout the middle of the book he spent too much time on the legal wranglings of the unions and various commercial and municipal entities and the unstandardized box sizes, etc. Although the author seemed to lose sight of his own story at times, he would always come back to it because it was anchored around the lives of a few key individuals, especially that of Malcolm McLean, the "father" of container shipping. The narration was unproblematic, but not stellar. For a topic such as this, I wouldn't expect it to be.

What did you like best about this story?

This book definitely communicated the monumental changes that container shipping brought about, and also made us understand that container shipping was not an overnight success, but evolved over time through the perseverance of pioneering individuals who had a vision of its power to streamline society.

What three words best describe Adam Lofbomm’s voice?

Normal, non-irritating, radio.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No.

Any additional comments?

This was a great book with a respectable narration.

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7 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Outstanding!

Any additional comments?

Marc Levinson finally wrote the book that was long-overdue to be written. Professors often tell students that the shipping container revolutionized business platform around the world, but until now, they weren't been able to explain exactly *how* this came about. Before shipping standardization, international trade was not much to speak of by comparison since loading and unloading merchant ships with non-standardized items such as baskets, barrels, cages, bags, etc. would take several days and many bodies. The vision and implementation was driven by entrepreneurs like Malcom McLean, among others. The idea was to be able to take a container off of a truck or rail car, effortlessly place it onto a ship, quickly remove it from the ship and place it onto another truck or rail car (intermodal freight transport). Along the way, McLean and his competitors fought against protectionism from the railroads, trade unions and various governments, but ultimately, the demand for standardization became strongest during the Vietnam War as the US government desperately sought a more efficient means to transport goods.

The Box is both exciting and very well-written. Anyone remotely interested in international trade, business, logistics or related fields should consider The Box a must-read!

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Disappointing

I bought this audiobook with high hopes after I saw that it got pretty good reviews and because I am always interested in a good business/economics story. I was disappointed. The story is straightforward and fairly dry. This felt stretched as a book and would have been a better long magazine article. In addition, the narrator is pretty flat. This one was a bit of a slog to get through.

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4 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

Thinking outside 'The Box'

If the book were 30-50% shorter, it might have received higher ratings from me. Summation: Economy's of scale make sense. Global transportation, infrastructure and logistics require government subsidies and with that come government control and restrictions. You could fast forward to the last 6 minutes of the book to garner 80% of the knowledge in the book.

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3 personnes ont trouvé cela utile

A portrait of disruptive innovation.

Any additional comments?

What kind of cutting edge technology allowed the world to collapse in size within a generation? It’s hiding in plain sight in every rail-yard and shipping port in the world- the humble shipping container. This isn’t so much a book about the transportation industry but rather a surprising look into a pivot point in globalization. The shipping container (or box) annihilated whole segments of the economy that were constructed around the inefficiency of break-bulk shipping and the sheer armies of labor required to transport goods via ship prior to this simple concept.If you enjoy economics and the nature of trade give this a listen!

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Great story and some good lessons.

A digestible history of how the shipping container evolved and, seemingly unnoticed, changed the shipping industry and almost unitized accelerated the globalization of supply chains. A timely read following the COVID 19 pandemic.

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Interesting story but distracting narration

The story of container shipping is interesting and new to me, so that aspect was very good.

However, I keep noticing the issue with the narration.. there’s parts where the audio quality and voice changes dramatically, not at a chapter boundary but just randomly… also sometimes the narration repeats words and phrases. I’ve never had listened to another audiobook with issues like this.

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fascinating view of economic changes and why

interesting story of how technology intertwines with world economics and politics. definitely recommend reading it

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A but dull, numbers are difficult to translate

Overall, just a bit dull. The numbers don’t translate well. So many dates and numbers of goods tonnage and years. They would’ve benefited from rewriting some of the raw numbers to use delta windows on years and changes. I would’ve much rather heard things like “roughly doubled over five years” instead of “1784 in 1967 and 3452 in 1972”.

Production quality was also quite low. Quality of the vocal recording changed randomly quite often. Usually right in the middle of a sentence.

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Good book.

This is an excellent account fo an innovation. Deeper looks at the regulatory frameworks and environmental and international perspectivesis now needed.

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