Seized: A Sea Captain's Adventures Battling Scoundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World's Most Troubled Waters [Hardcover]

Max Hardberger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 6, 2010

Seized throws open the hatch on the shadowy world of maritime shipping, where third-world governments place exorbitant liens against ships, pirates seize commercial vessels with impunity, crooks and con artists reign supreme on the docks and in the shipyards—and hapless owners have to rely on sea captain Max Hardberger to recapture their ships and win justice on the high seas.
 
A ship captain, airplane pilot, lawyer, teacher, writer, adventurer, and raconteur, Max Hardberger recovers stolen freighters for a living.  In Seized, he takes us on a real-life journey into the mysterious world of freighters and shipping, where fortunes are made and lost by the whims of the waves.  Desperate owners hire Max Hardberger to “extract” or steal back ships that have been illegitimately seized by putting together a mission-impossible team to sail them into international waters under cover of darkness.  It’s a high stakes assignment—if Max or his crew are caught, they risk imprisonment or death.
 
Seized takes readers behind the scenes of the multibillion dollar maritime industry, as he recounts his efforts to retrieve freighters and other vessels from New Orleans to the Caribbean, from East Germany to Vladivostak, Russia, and from Greece to Guatemala.  He resorts to everything from disco dancing to women of the night to distract the shipyard guards, from bribes to voodoo doctors to divert attention and buy the time he needs to sail a ship out of a foreign port without clearance.  Seized is adventure nonfiction at its best.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this heart-stopping account of his work recovering stolen (or otherwise illegally-seized) ships from "hellhole" ports, commercial captain Hardberger proves himself tough as a tank and articulate as a poet. An airplane pilot, teacher, and lawyer besides, Hardberger never turns down an assignment, no matter how perilous-from surreptitiously repossessing huge ships at midnight to transporting a fleet of old airplanes across East Germany in a perilous airborne convoy. Facing down foes that include gangsters, corrupt judges, and, of course, pirates, Hardberger proves a formidable hero, but nevertheless admits that "my long experience in leading men into dicey situations had taught me to keep my qualms to myself." Hardberger has a seafarer's gift for atmospheric storytelling, layering details to create a sense of place, history, and foreboding, as when outsmarting deceptive authorities at a Honduran port: "I knew that pier well, and those pilings had been rotten since Simon Bolivar was a boy." Full of the suspense that comes from ripping off the bad guys and making a daring escape, often aboard less-than-reliable craft ("the ship could only make a desperate run for Belize... before the hold filled with water and she took a nosedive into the sea") Hardberger's escapades make undeniably fun reading.

From Booklist

Hardberger has taught school, played rock, flown airplanes as crop duster and flight instructor, and practiced law. His major qualification is as a Licensed Master Mariner (All Tonnage, All Oceans), and his major profession is fighting pirates. Not the kind with motor boats and assault rifles, though he has had to work around both at the risk of his life, but rather the kind who rely on bribes to Third World governments, shadow corporations, shipyards that resemble chop shops, and various other devices far more subtle but quite as effective for illegally seizing ships as anything Somali goons have devised. There is material for half a dozen thrillers in Hardberger’s life, in which he has suffered divorce, bereavement, and penury but fought a very specialized form of good fight with more successes than failures. Irresistible and informative. --Roland Green

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; First Edition edition (April 6, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767931386
• ISBN-13: 978-0767931380
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (55 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #156,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Max Hardberger has been an airplane pilot, a maritime lawyer, a high school English teacher, a writer, an adventurer, a sea captain of commercial freighters and a ship repossession specialist. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop. His 1998 novel, Freighter Captain, was drawn from a series of voyages he made as a freighter captain in the Caribbean in the late 1980's. His 2010 memoir, SEIZED! A Sea Captain's Adventures Battling Scoundrels and Pirates While Recovering Stolen Ships in the World's Most Troubled Waters, covers some of the ship extractions he's made in his 20-year career as a ship-recovery specialist.

His adventures have been featured by NPR, The Learning Channel, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other publications. When not on the high seas, he lives in Louisiana. His website is www.maxhardberger.com.