These chapters are vibrant as individual stories, but as a collection they’re transcendent, rendering a complex portrait of an unseen and disturbing world. Urbina pursues a depth of reportage that’s rare because of the guts and diligence it requires—not to mention the budget, which must have been enormous. The result is not just a fascinating read, but a truly important document. It is also a master class in journalism. As he enters these worlds, Urbina provides glimpses into his methods, his fears and misconceptions. He describes how, even at home, he keeps a backpack ready to leave at a moment’s notice; he recounts failed attempts to reach ships, bribes and begging and desperate solutions ... This kind of writing—a catalog of the reporter’s process—can veer into self-indulgence, but for Urbina it’s another tool by which he invites readers into communities, demonstrating how isolated they are, how vulnerable and suspicious, and how their governance is designed to hold no one truly accountable. For all it exposes, The Outlaw Ocean doesn’t offer the comfort of a call to action. No buy-this-instead-of-that seafood guides; no illusion of consumer choices as an answer. Instead, we are left with the discomfort of complicity. There is no clear solution to the ocean’s problems because our entire world—our economic system, our geography—is the cause.

On the surface, The Outlaw Ocean is an outstanding example of investigative journalism, illuminating some of the darkest corners of a world we often don't think about ... Urbina, who has won both a Pulitzer and a George Polk Award, decided to focus on this often ignored world — and what he found ranges from horrible to shocking and from unfair to unbelievable ... There are two elements that make The Outlaw Ocean an magnificent read. The first is Urbina's knack for framing and structure ... The second element is Urbina's writing. His style is concise and straightforward and he has the ability to summarize while also offering a lot of information and contextualizing his discoveries in a way that make readers see the differences between life and crime on land and life and crime on the water ... The Outlaw Ocean is not an easy read, and that's a good thing ... The Outlaw Ocean is an engrossing and immersive book that shows the ocean is the last frontier: a vast place where the laws don't apply ... a testament to [Urbina's] reporting skills and proof that outstanding writing is still one of the best tools we have to get to know the world we live in.

... a book that leaves behind the unnerving feeling that we’re becalmed and can move in no positive direction: The Outlaw Ocean brings the reader up close to an overwhelming truth, but the magnitude of the revelation is paralyzing ... That Urbina has been able to pluck these people out of the vast blue expanse that surrounds them and locate them, both on the map and in our minds, is an impressive feat of reporting ... While all nonfiction books presumably exist to tell readers something they didn’t already know, The Outlaw Ocean uses our lack of knowledge to bolster his argument: If we don’t know much about sea slavery or the battles between environmentalists and the fishing industry, it’s because it’s hard for us landlubbers to know what happens so far from shore ... Urbina is so successful at communicating the scale of the ocean, and the cruelty and neglect above and below its waters, that reading his book sometimes feels like gasping for a breath of air before slipping under the waves again ... Urbina deftly reveals complicated ideas through his stories, whether he’s exploring how lacunas in Thai labor law leave sea slaves vulnerable or depicting firsthand how flags of convenience meant to track ships can be used to make them disappear.

The niche for this book, beyond readers who love gritty tales from the sea, is a peculiar one. It is not a work of social-justice warfare, although it is hard to read without pangs of sympathy for the enslaved fishermen and pangs of guilt for that cheap can of tuna. Nor is it a work of adventure ... The most valuable contribution of The Outlaw Ocean may be to the literature, unfortunately quite extensive by now, of pessimism about human nature. Mr. Urbina is too factual a reporter to dwell on this point—indeed, he makes halfhearted gestures at sentimentality about life at sea—but in aggregate his stories reveal that something like a Hobbesian state of nature still exists and is available to anyone willing to float a few dozen miles offshore.

..[a] tour de force of intrepid global inquiry ... With precision, drama, and intimacy, Urbina recounts his role in a dangerous at-sea standoff between Indonesian and Vietnamese authorities, a frightening escape from Somalia, and many other harrowing situations, and describes his tenuous network of sources, translators, fixers, and spies. His biggest fear is that his risky quest may do harm to people rather than good, but there is no doubt that the bravely gleaned and galvanizing facts about maritime savagery and brewing catastrophes, which he so vividly and cogently presents, coalesce into an exposé of immense magnitude and consequence.

Urbina engagingly chronicles his travels from one trouble spot to another ... Urbina’s book ranks alongside those by Mark Bowden and Sebastian Junger, fraught with peril and laced with beer, the smell of sea air, and constant bouts of gaming an inept system. A swift-moving, often surprising account of the dangers that face sailors and nations alike on the lawless tide.

... stunning ... [Urbina] crafts very human portraits of all these people and the lawless world they inhabit. He also pauses regularly to step back and appreciate the staggering physical beauty of that world ... 'Impunity is the norm at sea' Urbina writes, and The Outlaw Ocean is the fullest and most lifelike snapshot of that impunity’s variations that the young new century has seen. The enormous and renegade world Urbina describes is one Captain Forbes would have recognized immediately back in the 1820s.

With the world’s seafood stocks in crisis, Urbina lifts the thick veil on a global criminal culture, at just the moment when the damage inflicted on the oceans is becoming terminal.

... gripping and shocking by turns ... [Urbina's] cast of characters as broad and as deep as the oceans themselves ... Most of the book clips along with the pace of a thriller. Urbina is best when describing chases and fights ... At the start of the book Urbina explains that, rather than force it into a 'single, straight-line narrative', he has left it as a series of essays, for the readers to 'connect the dots'. At times this is grating — the book doesn’t just sprawl, but hops around from subject to subject; episodes, such as the one on Sealand, bob up incongruously out of nowhere, like buoys near the shore. But perhaps this is appropriate too — the oceans are not just vast and deep, but unpredictable. More of the night sky has been mapped than the oceans’ depths; much still remains unknown. This book will make you look at them again and see them anew.

... devastating ... The writing is straightforward but clever—Urbina packs sentences with a lot of information, but they never seem bloated. Atmospheric moments are rare but eerie and beautiful when they do appear ... Urbina’s reporting is clearly driven by a sense of responsibility to the people he meets, and the book offers a glimpse into his relationship with his subjects that isn’t visible in his newspaper articles ... These failures can make the book feel Sisyphean. No matter how relentlessly Urbina chases a scofflaw ship or an abusive captain, the sea can swallow them up ... Urbina doesn’t spend much time linking American consumers and the abuses he chronicles, but the connection is obvious ... doesn’t have an answer for how to avoid complicity in this system, but one thing is certain: abuses will keep happening as long as no one is watching.