Tuesday, August 06, 2013

"A Valiant Effort to Peer into the Essence of Surfing Culture"

"It raises an intriguing idea: Surfers cannot escape their middle-class culture, despite their rebellious inclinations to challenge conformity—just like Jack Kerouac's beatniks in 'On the Road.'
"'The only reason the Beats could chase their kicks, or surfers the endless summer, was because society was affluent enough to support them,' the authors write. 'Like the ancient Hawaiians, middle-class Americans in the 1950s enjoyed material abundance that made leisure a common privilege.'"

Kenneth R. Weiss in the Los Angeles Times reviews Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul's The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing.

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