Pub. Date - July 21, 2015
4.5 stars
For a lifelong, landlocked Midwesterner like myself, surfing is an unlikely pastime which is why I found this memoir so fascinating. The author grew up in Southern California and Hawaii and started surfing at a hound age. He has spent a lifetime surfing in almost every major wave location and knows the people and the surf culture very well. He begins with his year living in Hawaii, going to school with the locals with pretty scant supervision and quite a bit of adolescent violence. He then narrates his travels around the world with different friends searching for out of the place surf spots with perfect waves. It is a honest memoir and he at times look back at his interactions with locals with embarrassment and consternation that comes with the wisdom of age. His day job as a journalist and essayist took him to many war torn countries and I found myself wishing there was a little more here about that. Towards the end, as his anecdote's enter middle-age and beyond, the individual surfing details become a bit monotonous and run together but otherwise I found myself hypnotized by most everything described in this memoir. He has truly led a adventurous life and his memoir remarkably captures the obsession with surfing and the changing culture through the years. I received an electronic ARC of this book from Penguin's First to Read program in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment