Krieger, Michael J. 1940-

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KRIEGER, Michael J. 1940-

PERSONAL: Born May 13, 1940, in San Francisco, CA; son of Alfred and Nancy Krieger; married; wife's name, Susan. Education: University of California—Berkeley, B.A.

ADDRESSES: Home—WA. Agent—Jane Dystel, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, One Union Square W., Ste. 904, New York, NY 10003.

CAREER: Writer, adventurer, and journalist. International Building Products, Inc., San Francisco, CA, owner, 1964-69; Consolidated Foods Corporation, Geneva, Switzerland, European manager, 1969-74. Journalist and travel writer, 1974—.

WRITINGS:

Tramp: Sagas of High Adventure in the Vanishing World of the Old Tramp Freighters, Chronicle Books (San Francisco, CA), 1986.

Conversations with the Cannibals: The End of the Old South Pacific, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1994.

Where Rails Meet the Sea: America's Connections between Ships and Trains, MetroBooks (New York, NY), 1998.

All the Men in the Sea: The Untold Story of One of the Greatest Rescues in History, Free Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of articles to periodicals. Author of travel essays syndicated to newspapers by Universal Press Syndicate.

SIDELIGHTS: Michael J. Krieger once told CA: "From 1964 to 1969, I owned and operated International Building Products, Inc., a shipping and import-export company, with offices in Singapore and San Francisco. I chartered and accompanied freighters carrying cargoes from Indonesia and Malaysia to Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then from 1969 to 1974 I was European manager for companies of the Consolidated Foods Corporation—headquartered near Geneva, Switzerland—and was responsible for the movement of all the companies' exports to Europe and Africa.

"I began writing in 1974. My work, which is on a broad range of subjects, appears in both American and European periodicals, and has been syndicated in the travel sections of over two hundred newspapers by Universal Press Syndicate. I was the first Western journalist to be allowed by the People's Republic of China to do stories on that country's entire maritime transportation system."

Krieger's propensity for maritime and other types of travel has taken him to many different places about which he writes. For his work Conversations with the Cannibals: The End of the Old South Pacific, Krieger spent considerable time with South Pacific peoples who had been known in the past to practice ritual cannibalism. They explained to him the differences between eating the body of a relative to gain his or her powers and eating the body of an enemy as a final act of domination. These people also described various killing, preparation, and cooking techniques, and even shared favorite recipes with the author. In an interview with Douglas Cruickshank for Salon.com, Krieger was asked how he started searching for cannibals. "I didn't really set out to look for them," he replied. "I'd read a magazine article that questioned the existence of ritual cannibalism because there were no firsthand accounts. Then when I was out in the South Pacific, someone said 'These old fellows used to practice cannibalism,' and of course my ears perked up." Krieger found that cannibalism had existed in those areas as recently as the 1950s. He was told that it was not something that occurred every day, but rather once every few months. He also found that women and children did not eat the meat because it was considered a delicacy and therefore reserved for the warriors. When Cruickshank asked Krieger if Western society contained any practices that would be considered taboo to the cannibals, he answered, "Sure, the Melanesians had many, many taboos. For instance, a woman having sexual relations with somebody not her husband would be put to death. Probably the taboos that they considered the worst were, in their minds, far, far worse than how we consider cannibalism."

In a later work, Krieger chronicles a disaster at sea and pays homage to the heroes of the tragedy. All the Men in the Sea: The Untold Story of One of the Greatest Rescues in History begins on an October day in 1995 as barge 269 floated sixty miles from the shore of the Yucatan Peninsula and divers worked furiously 160 feet below the ocean's surface to finish laying oil pipeline before Hurricane Roxanne rolled in. As the divers returned from the ocean's depths and entered the decompression chamber for an accelerated decompression necessary for survival, the pipeline company contacted the barge and instructed its captain to ride out the storm. They were behind schedule, and the captain wanted to complete the work of the twenty-seven-million-dollar contract as soon as the storm passed. The barge was tied to three tugboats, which would help it stay afloat if the waves got rough. Hurricane Roxanne moved through, causing minimal damage to the barge. But then, it turned around and came back at the vessels with amazing force, its ninety-mile-an-hour winds creating thirty-foot waves that crashed down over the barge, scattering its passengers into the sea and breaking the barge from its tugboat escorts. Krieger tells how the tugboat captains turned their vessels sideways to bear the brunt of the waves, risking their lives and those of their crew in an effort to save the barge, which was exploding and leaking oil over the men trapped in the sea. The author also relates how a fourth tugboat came to the barge's aid, and how, all through the night, the captains threw life rafts into the sea and pulled man after man from the oil-slicked water, minimizing the deaths of the tragedy to eight.

In All the Men in the Sea, Krieger "deliver[s] a rousing story, directing the narrative like an old-fashioned melodrama," explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who also dubbed the book a "feverish tale of rescue" and added that "Tugboats aren't renowned for their balletic qualities, but Krieger finds in them a beautiful, intrepid choreography." One Publishers Weekly reviewer called All the Men in the Sea a "thrilling story," and pointed out that the latter part of the work focuses on the lawsuit filed against the barge owners "by various parties who are still plagued by the choking memories of a debacle so viscerally captured," most of which have not yet been settled.