Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results - Hardcover

Moore, Michael Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1605294276 ISBN 13: 9781605294278

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2010

Synopsis

An elegant and surprising history of surfing that examines its cultural influence in some of the most unexpected places

How did an obscure tribal sport from precolonial Hawaii—one that was nearly eliminated on its home islands by Christian missionaries—jump oceans to California and Australia? And how did it become such a worldwide passion, influencing lives around the globe?

In this brilliantly written travel adventure, journalist and surfer Moore visits unlikely surfing destinations —Gaza, West Africa, North England, Berlin, Bali, Japan, Cuba, and Morocco—to give the reader a folk history of surfing. This is a personal sketch for any curious reader of how the modern sport moved around the world and mingled with cultures that either have nothing to do with Hawaii or have strong reasons to resist pop silliness from the First World. The result is the story of hippies, soldiers, nutcases, and colonialism; a checkered history of the spread of Western culture in the years after World War II.

Moore brings to his subject a sense of adventure and relevance that will appeal to surfers and nonsurfers alike.

About this title

About the Author:

MICHAEL SCOTT MOORE is a novelist and journalist who has written on politics and travel for publications such as the Atlantic, Slate, Spiegel online, Miller-McCune magazine, and the Financial Times. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

AUTHOR'S APOLOGY

as a history of surfing, this book isn't definitive. It completely shortchanges--among other major forces--Dale Velzy, Mary Ann Hawkins, Greg Noll, and most of Australia. What I've tried to assemble is a folk history of surfing, a personal sketch for any curious reader of how the modern sport moved around the world and mingled with cultures that either have nothing to do with Hawaii or have strong reasons to resist pop silliness from the first world. The result is a story of hippies, soldiers, nutcases, and colonialism, a checkered history of the spread of Western culture in the years after World War II.

"Dude, you should have gone to Brazil," people told me. Or, "Are there really good waves in Gaza?"--as if the point were to search for beautiful surf. No, no, no. I left out major wave-riding nations like Mexico, France, and South Africa because most surfers know about them. Wherever possible I chose offbeat nearby countries (Cuba, Germany, Sao Tome and Principe) to give the general reader an idea of how surfing reached each general part of the world and still, I hope, offer the dedicated surf historian something new--about how the sport mingled with Communism, or how it wound up in the North Sea.

The travel--spread over several years--starts with Chapter 2. Chapter 1 is really a prologue, a highly subjective but (I hope) still interesting review of the basic facts. I set out on this book as a landlocked scribbler, living as a journalist in Berlin. But I'd never stopped being a surfer, and I'd lived too long thinking the material I grew up with, the relentless superficial glare of southern California, had no value for a writer. Even pop culture has a human history, and modern surfing happens to be as American as baseball or jazz. By that I don't mean to claim it for America--surfing, almost as much as soccer, is a world sport--but I do want to provide ammunition against the eternal domestic bigots who say certain (ever-shifting, normally coastal) parts of America somehow don't belong; or against Europeans who think everything exported by America is bad; or against Northeastern snobs who think surfing isn't worth their time. Those three groups of people would never care to be caught together at a dinner party, but to me they're partners in ignorance.

Anyway, this isn't Endless Summer. It's not a pleasure trip, or a search for the ultimate stoke. When a surfer takes off on a wave, there are two possible results, and my book is about them both.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rodale Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1605294276
• ISBN 13: 9781605294278
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336