Cruise Ships: The World's Most Luxurious Vessels

摘要

It is nearly 60 years since your reviewer saw the French liner Liberte visiting the Clyde. She was then one of only four or five passenger ships of more than 40,000 tons (gross). This book describes 160 such ships - half of them belonging to a single huge conglomerate (the Carnival Cruise line). But of course they have a different purpose from their predecessors. The enormous expansion of cruising, traditionally the prerogative of a wealthy elite, took place in the late twentieth century as a consequence of the increasing affluence of the Western middle classes. This in turn gave rise to ever larger cruise ships as dictated by economies of scale: the first of this type, the Sovereign of the Seas of 1988, at 73,000 tons (not much smaller than the largest of the old Atlantic liners) is now dwarfed by many others, of up to 220,000 tons.