Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results
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- ISBN13: 9781605294278
- Condition: New
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Product Description
An elegant and surprising history of surfing that examines its cultural influence in some of the most unexpected places
How did an obscure clannish 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 stirred 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 tale 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 theme a sense of adventure and weight that will appeal to surfers and nonsurfers alike.
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Less a history of surfing than a personal memoir of a globe-trotting surfer. Readable and entertaining, but not what I was expecting.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Which is why this is such a tough review to write.
Despite loving the magazines, many of us, certainly the leader of this book, undoubtedly were regularly disappointed by the quality of writing establish in Surfer and Surfing and wished that it were on a par with the unbelievably fantastic surf photography they published. The articles one savored at ages 13 and 14 went over a bit like soggy toast a few years later after one had begun to read more broadly. Thus, this book caused one to feel both excitement and trepidation: Trepidation that it would be written at the level of most surf literature. Excitement because, well, it’s a book about surfing!
Michael Scott Moore is not a poor writer. In fact, he’s pretty excellent. Excellent enough so that it was simple to get involved in the book and not want to place it down after an hour. But, after one had place it to rest, one felt no real compulsion to pick it up straight away. Uncharacteristically, it took about a week to get through what is only about a four hour read. For some reason the book does not have pull enough to cause one to make time read it.
This is possibly because it really isn’t about surfing. No, this is more a meditation about what many call Americanization, or the spread of American culture, with surfing being the proxy for American culture.
It is really a clever contrivance, as is the leader’s conceit to attempt to identify that point in time when the first stand up surfing occurred in various parts of the world and editorialize about the look and feel of the places he visits on his quest (Israel/Palestine, Germany, Wales, Morocco, Cuba, Indonesia, Japan, West Africa) and how they have been affected by their interactions with the ‘West.’
While his insights aren’t piercing or exactly accurate they do cause one to at least take them seriously and reflect about them. His craft is excellent enough so that his incomplete travel narratives are at least appealing if not fully developed, and his thoughts are imaginative albeit not particularly well-executed (perhaps not from a want of trying….identifying that first electrifying moment in a nation’s history is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack, after all).
He would have done well to more sharply define his premise, or at least more fully renovate the one he runs with. In an apologia the leader addresses this weakness by stating that he attempted to make a folk history, and not a definitive history. He did start to; and the book would have been the better if he had pursued the logic that got him to locate the likes of Mike Purpus (Ha!, he’s not the only one who went looking for him a few years ago, albeit via web search.), and spend a gratifyingly long time on Miki Dora.
Somewhere along the way, but, he started to let the Western Culture/Americanization slant take over his narrative, which is never right anyway….(Driving Ford pick up trucks whilst wearing cowboy boots and hats, and drinking coca cola, doesn’t make Mexicans Americanized any more than it makes Americans Japanized or Eastern for eating Sushi, reading manga and wearing Hello Fund paraphernalia).
One suspects that by not sharpening his focus and developing a tale around that narrow vision, the leader establish the many wonderful but disparate threads he started to pull together threatening to grow into an overwhelmingly large tapestry of thoughts, so he chose to just ball them all up in a muddle. As such, the book’s narrative gets cast adrift and ultimately drowns in ambiguity.
*Final note, the analysis of Japanese culture by one Bill Totten is particularly odious and incorrect-headed and one hopes, for his sake, that none of his colleagues read it.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I wrote this review for San Francisco Magazine.
The king of Morocco institutes a surf school to combat Islamic radicals. Punks in Munich dodge local police to surf urban rivers. A Cali fornian doctor sneaks surfboards into Palestine for the Gaza Surf Club. What’s happening here? When you reflect about America’s global pop-culture influence, Beyoncé, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan come to mind long before Kelly Slater. But journ alist, avid surfer, and ex- SF Weekly theater critic Michael Scott Moore does a fine job of arguing that surfing–yes, as in Point Break–may be our country’s most influential cultural export. (The sport is Polynesian in origin, but its modern incarnation is distinctly American.) Moore travels to unlikely surf destin ations worldwide, dredging up fascinating past tidbits and interviews, many of which debunk long-held myths: For example, the first surfers to ride waves in Indonesia were not Australian hippies in the ’60s but an American couple, Bob and Louise Koke, in 1936. You don’t automatically come away from Moore’s book convinced of his thesis, but his irreverent style and diligent research capture a truer–and sometimes darker–aspect of the surfer’s sacred search for the perfect wave. A-
–JAIMAL YOGIS, leader of Saltwater Buddha
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
In Michael Scott Moore’s clued-in and far-flung “Sweetness and Blood,” the border guard, so to speak, exchanges his military uniform for baggy shorts and a rash vest. The surfer who came in from the cold. Trabants out, woodies in.
On Moore’s post-cold-war surfari, every one is now a beach bum, no one is bummed, anyone can surf anytime, anywhere, from Cuba to Morocco, from the Gaza Strip to Japan. Of course, the Siberian waves aren’t too hot. And personally, I still require palm trees and a sultry breeze before I paddle out. But Moore and a robust wet suit have boldly gone where only serious and regularly seriously unhinged dudes have gone before, mapping out a fresh, unexpected cartography of the waves.
The literature of surfing takes off in the late 18th century, with the voyages of Capt. James Cook. Cook couldn’t even swim, much less surf, which perhaps clarifies why the Hawaiian watermen eventually did to him exactly what his name seemed to be recommending. But not before one of his crew confirmed surfing “the most supreme pleasure.” It was the kind of utopianism that seeped even into the French Revolution, though it was tempered by the guillotine.
The tradition of the surf bard extolling the exploits of ace riders goes right back to the origins of surfing, a millennium or so ago, in the islands of Polynesia. It was never enough just to go surfing: you had to hype it up, too. Moore is a modern surf troubadour, singing the adventures of a cast of eccentric pioneers, not to mention Agatha Christie (whose surf writing had hitherto escaped me) and the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who becomes a kind of honorary surfer by virtue of having been an individualist and unorthodox who spent time in jail.
The classic lexicon of “epic,” “insane” and “gnarly” is mostly set aside here. Highly imperfect waves abound. The closing line of the book, quoting a Japanese surfer, “Paddle, paddle — and sometimes, huge wave come!,” sounds like “Waiting for Godot” with (or rather lacking) waves. Moore, an itinerant American who lives in Berlin and writes for Spiegel Online International, writes in a spirit closer to Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” than to the latest issue of Carve.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
As many people know, surfing originated as a recreational sport of Hawaiian royalty. It was then taken up by commoners, and when westerners arrived in Hawaii they were amazed at the Hawaiian’s wave sliding. In the 1920s Duke Kahanamoku went on a surfing tour to California, and that is probably the root of the west coast’s surfing culture. What was once an obscure sport developed in one of the most remote places on the planet has since become a enveloping influence on every continent on Planet (except maybe Antarctica).
Michael Scott Moore’s book tells of his travels to surfing spots around the world and his efforts to uncover the earliest evidence of surfing in each of persons places: Hawaii, California, Indonesia, Germany (river surfing+), Morocco, The United Kingdom (surfing tidal boles), Israel and the Gaza strip, Cuba, Sao Tome and Principe (Africa), and Japan. it’s a globetrotter’s tale of life, times, culture, and the incursion of surf culture into each of persons places.
if you are looking for a book about surfing, this is not it. This is a book about a quest to know regional origins of surfing. Even so, I establish the book to be enjoyable, even if it did seem at times like the book read like a travelogue blog (-1 star).
You do have to admit that surf culture has infused itself into just about every part of global culture. I saw a surf shop last week while I was traveling in north-central Utah, of all places! I see surf emblems and posters all over the place…even where I live in Idaho! There’s no surf here, but there is really reasonably an active long boarding (skim boarding) collective, and long boarders and surfers share many attitudes and cultural perspectives (I know this after living in Hawaii for 1.5 years and 5 years in Santa Cruz, CA).
So, Moore establish that not only surfing, but also surf culture has made its way around and into the world.
if his sounds appealing to you, then you will probably like this book. If all you want is a book about surfing, keep on looking.
4 stars
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5