The World in the Curl: An Unconventional History of Surfing by Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul

(Crown, $26)

Finally, a history of surfing not written by one of the cool kids, said Nathan Myers in The Wall Street Journal. While previous surfing chroniclers have tended to be insiders keen on conveying the transcendental hipness of their favorite pastime, history professors Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul are “studious, meticulous,” and quite earnest about sorting fact from myth. Sure, their account “sometimes reads like a well-rehearsed university lecture.” But a sport that’s now practiced by 20 million people surely needs a clear-eyed look.

Surfers, it seems, are “not nearly as cool or subversive as they like to think,” said John Lancaster in The Washington Post. Westwick and Neushul thoroughly debunk the long-standing myth that Christian missionaries in Hawaii abhorred surfing when they first spotted natives riding the waves (only surfing in the nude truly offended the newcomers). What’s more, the 20th-century spread of surfing might never have occurred absent a few assists from the military-industrial complex. It was aircraft-wing technology, for instance, that freed surfers from having to lug around 100-pound redwood boards. And because the Army Corps of Engineers has been relentlessly building and rebuilding the nation’s coastlines for decades, that outfit, the authors write, “has done more to shape surfing than any of the celebrated heroes of surf culture.”

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Surfers also are not the pure lovers of nature some pretend to be, said Josh Dzieza in TheDailyBeast.com. Because surf breaks frequently are created by human interventions, wave riders at times find themselves battling conservationists. At the same time, the sport’s boosters can generally be counted on to fight ocean pollution, particularly the sewage outflows that sully some of California’s best breaks. Surfers, it seems, don’t inhabit a purer plane than the rest of us but play at the border between our man-made world and the wild ocean. Understanding as much “doesn’t diminish the sport.” If anything, such insights make surfing more fascinating.