Book Review: The World of the Curl

The World of the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfingby Peter Westwick and Peter NeushulCrown, 2013 If two college professors concoct a class on the history of surfing - and especially if such a class becomes a campus hit - they can be rightly suspected of pandering. It's an understandable if deplorable trade-off: in order to get nice healthy registration head-counts, you offer a "class" on video games, or airport thrillers - or surfing - to lazy undergraduate you know perfectly well can't tell Chaucer from Chewbacca, and you hope (I suppose) that while you're shamelessly offering them cakes and ale they're getting their academic meat and potatoes somewhere else, instead of simply going without and thereby graduating from college knowing less about their cultural heritage than the average 10-year-old did 50 years ago.Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul of the University of California at Santa Barbara, authors of The World of the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing, can be absolved of most such suspicions, however, through one saving grace: they were both long-time avid surfers well before they started offering their hugely popular class on the history of the sport, and their book presumably sprang from that class. It's still pandering - the idea of tanned American students taking notes on their iPads about Billabong and board design must bring a smile to the faces of Chinese exchange students on the rare breaks they take from studying thermonuclear dynamics - but at least our authors come by it honestly.And their class must indeed by very good, judging by how intelligent and entertaining this book is. The World of the Curl traces the meteoric rise of surfing from an obscure Polynesian pastime to the multi-billion dollar international industry it is today, touching on all the most popular venues and all the sport's biggest stars, from Duke Kahanamoku to Laird Hamilton to "Baywatch" cutie-patootie Kelly Slater. Along the way, almost by contractual necessity, Westwick and Neushul have to slosh around the kind of wax-on/wax-off sheep-dip that always seems to accompany this subject, so we get blocks of utter nonsense:

Surfing has always been more than a sport. In ancient Hawaii it was a way life, a philosophy. The world of surf, nalu, also meant to investigate, to search after truth and the origin of things. Kanalu was the highest order of priesthood in ancient Hawaii, introduced by early Polynesian settlers. Their ancient migrations proved to Hawaiians that life came from the surf, and would return to the surf. In recognition of this, nalu could also refer to the fluid that covered newborn babies. Hawaiians were literally born surfers.

But the book is also full of fascinating side-notes to the whole subject, including a hilariously revolting digression on how dirty surfing can be. After helpfully reminding us that "232 metric tons of excrement from humans and 5.5 billion metric tons from livestock" get produced every year, and warning us that "all this offal is crawling with pathogens that can survive for weeks or months in salt water at a wide range of temperatures and salinities," our authors clue us in to the ultimate destination of this "mind-boggling and stomach-churning fecal burden":

Surfing takes place at the interface between civilization and the ocean. Many of them most desirable surfing spots are located near large concentrations of people, for whom the ocean is their ultimate toilet bowl ... Basically, if you relieve yourself in New York or L.A. in the morning and surf a few days later, there's a good chance you will reunite with a little piece of yourself, not to mention millions of your fellow citizens.

On other hazards of the sport, Westwick and Neushul are far more diplomatic - not to say delusional. Since something like forty surfers have been bumped, bitten, or bisected by sharks in the last year or so, for example, The World of the Curl has to make some sort of nod in that direction. "Surfing is one of the few remaining human activities where the participant enters the food chain below the apex," we're told. "The idea of a voracious predator the size of a small boat circling beneath one's feet conjures nightmares." But since the book is very much an advertisement for the sport, the nightmare is fleeting: instead of talking about the vastly increased dangers to surfers from inshore shark populations swiftly learning to prey on surfers, we instead get a paragraph or two about the U.S.S. Indianapolis.There's also the whiff of anti-corporate sentiments, perhaps only natural when dealing with a sport that's grown so "Hollywood" so fast. At regular intervals in their book's latter half, Westwick and Neushul gently deflate "the artificiality of surfing":

First surfboards went from natural wood to synthetic chemicals; surfwear went from bare skin to cotton and wool to synthetic nylon and neoprene. Finally, the waves themselves might go from natural to engineered coasts and finally to completely man-made pools.This raised a basic question for surfers: how much was nature part of surfing's attraction? ... If surfing is really about an encounter with nature, then you better grab your wooden alaia, ditch your wetsuit and go naked, and try to find an unengineered wave.

And despite the fact that you'll be swimming in sewage while being watched by giant prehistoric eating machines, that's exactly what you're encouraged to do. But thanks to earnest efforts like The World of the Curl, you could always opt simply to read about it instead.