The World in the Curl
This summer Crown/Random House is publishing The World in the Curl a new book co-authored by Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul about the history of surfing.
According to the press release:
The thinking-person’s guide to surfing and the world it has created.
Among the most popular courses at the University of California at Santa Barbara is a team-taught lecture series on the history of surfing that immerses students in the cultural, political, economic, and environmental consequences of surfing’s evolution from a sport of Hawaiian kings and queens to a billion-dollar worldwide industry. Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul bring more than sixty years of experience in the water to the class and are not surprised by the class’s popularity – UC Santa Barbara is, after all, a surfing school. The real surprise is that their non-surfing students outnumber the surfers. There is something about surfing that people yearn to understand – and this is the book that examines the enduring worldwide appeal of the sport both in myth and reality.
Drawing on the authors’ expertise as, respectively, a historian of science and technology and a historian of environmental history, The World in the Curl brings alive the colorful history of surfing by drawing readers into the forces that have fueled the sport’s expansion: colonialism, the military-industrial complex, globalization, capitalism, and race and gender roles. In a highly readable and provocative narrative history of the sport’s signal moments – from the spread of surfing to the US, to the development of surf culture, to big-wave frontiers, to the reintroduction of women into the sport – Neushul and Westwick draw an indelible portrait of surfing and surfers as actors on the global stage.
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