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| 2007
Wade, Alex: Surfing Nation In Search of the fast Lefts and Hollow Rights of Britain and Ireland. Simom and Shuster, UK ltd Africa House, 64-78 Kingsway, London WC2B 6AH, 2007. Pocket Books, 2008. Soft cover, 340 pages, black and white photographs, Acknowledgements, Glossary. Review Professionally written overview of the surfers and surfing locations of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland circa 2006. With some historical background (occassionally less than accurate, note the James Cook references) and literary and cinematic insights, Wade generally emphasises the rugged nature and quality of both the surfers and locations, which tends be be slightly repitious by the book's conclusion. Although not intended as a surf guide, a lack of maps makes the author's extensive travels somewhat confusing for the international reader. Chapter 12, on famous tidal bore on the Severn River, is a interesting contrast with storm generated ocean waves. |
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| Warner, P.F. (editor):
The Boy's Own Book of of Outdoor Games and Pastimes. The Religious Tract Society, 4 Bouverie Street and 65 St. Pauls Churchyard E.C., 1913. Extract:
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| 1988
Warren, Mark: Atlas of Australian Surfing Angus and Robertson Publishers Unit 4 Eden Park 31 Waterloo Road North Ryde NSW Australia 1988 Hard cover, 232 pages, 68 colour photographs?, 46 black and white maps?, Glossary, Index. Review Comprehensive guide to Australian surf breaks, in similar format to Jeff Carter (East Coast, 1968), Nat Young (East Coast, 1980/1983 and Surf/Sail Australia, 1986), Chris Rennie (Australia, 1998) and Richard Loveridge (Victoria, 1987). Break information (swell, tide, wind) is supplemented with occassional historical, cultural or personal observations. Blue boards with dust jacket. |
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| 1994
Warren, Mark: Atlas of Australian Surfing (Second Edition) Angus and Robertson Publishers Unit 4 Eden Park 31 Waterloo Road North Ryde NSW Australia. 1994 Hard cover, 232 pages, 68 colour photographs?, 46 black and white maps?, Glossary, Index. Review Comprehensive guide to Australian surf breaks, in similar format to Jeff Carter (East Coast, 1968), Nat Young (East Coast, 1980/1983 and Surf/Sail Australia, 1986), Chris Rennie (Australia, 1998) and Richard Loveridge (Victoria, 1987).. Break information (swell, tide, wind) is supplemented with occassional historical, cultural or personal observations. Basically same text/illustrations with some minor variation in format (pages 2 -3?), different cover in laminated boards. |
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| 1999
Warren, Mark: Atlas of Australian Surfing - Traveller's Edition Haper Collins Publishers 25 Ryde Road Pymble Sydney NSW 2073 Australia. 1999 Reprint of 1989 edition Laminated soft cover, 272 pages, 68 colour photographs, 46 black and white maps + continent map on end papers, Glossary, Index. Review Comprehensive guide to Australian surf breaks, in similar format to Jeff Carter (East Coast, 1968), Nat Young (East Coast, 1980/1983 and Surf/Sail Australia, 1986), Chris Rennie (Australia, 1998) and Richard Loveridge (Victoria, 1987). Break information (swell, tide, wind) is supplemented with occassional historical, cultural or personal observations. Despite being a 1999 edition, some details are incorrect -e.g. The Farm (page 126) is incorrectly shown on the map, appears to be confused with Mystics (page 127) and neither is private property, the area being declared as Killalea State Recreational Area in the early 1990's. This copy, courtesy of Shoalhaven City Library. |
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| 2004
Warshaw, Matt : The Encyclopedia of Surfing Viking Penguin Books Australia Pty Ltd 250 Camberwell Road Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Hard cover, 774 pages, black and white photographs. Appendicies include Bibliography, Contest Results, Movies, Magazines, Music. Review Encyclopedic. Personal note : Internet and surfing, page 293, notes... sites for surf history (legendarysurfers.com, surfresearch.com.au) |
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Nick Carroll's insightful
review,
realsurf forum,
Sunday Sep 19, 2010.
http://forum.realsurf.com/forum/search.php?t=18006
"Matt Warshaw: THE
HISTORY OF SURFING
Chronicle Books, USA (Hardie Grant Australia)
Only two people have attempted this terrifying task.
The first, in 1983, was Nat Young.
The second, after around six years of singular effort interrupted by
his wife having their first child, is Warshaw.
Two more different books on the same subject it’s kinda hard to imagine.
Nat’s book was big-format, thick on photos, thinnish on text, and grandiose
in intention. It was named “The Complete History Of Surfing” and was determined
to make itself the last word on the subject.
In fact it proved to be merely the first: since its publication, a
steady flow of research, articles, docos and books has long since washed
away its claims to omniscience.
The one thing it still has is the author’s voice – most touchingly
when recounting Nat’s own periods of pride and joy, the world title in
1966 and the turn to shorter boards immediately afterward.
Warshaw’s book is medium-format, thick on text, and thinner yet more
fascinating on photos.
It doesn’t bother with the adjective “Complete”.
In terms of both fact and historical framework, it is to Nat’s book
as Pipeline is to your backyard beachie.
“The History Of Surfing” is a natural follow-up on Matt’s earlier megawork,
“The Encyclopedia of Surfing”, and is written in the same dryly affectionate
tone.
Its determined thoroughness is instantly evident from the first chapter,
when Warshaw immediately pitches into the Peruvian Theory of surfing’s
origins.
This theory, unknown to Nat in ’83, suggests that the first surfing
was done by fishermen on the Peruvian coast on reed fishing craft known
as caballitos, anywhere from two to three thousand years ago.
It’s been analysed swiftly and completely here, with Warshaw concluding
that the fishermen may well have ridden waves before the Polynesians, but
that it remains “a self-contained prelude to surf history, not the starting
point”.
Then he makes two points many writers wouldn’t have had the wit to attempt.
First: who really knows how long humans have been riding waves for
fun, in Peru, Hawaii, or anywhere else the water might allow it?
“For any society living on a temperate coastline, riding waves would
likely be a natural, if not intuitive act … dolphins and pelicans and other
animals seem to do it purely out of enjoyment, after all.
When did the first human wade into the shorebreak and try to imitate
a dolphin?”
And second: why have surfers en masse greeted the Peruvian idea with
such flat-affect silence?
Warshaw suggests it’s defensiveness: “Surfers love the idea that their
chosen activity was born in translucent blue water, next to palm-fringed
beaches, and practiced by royalty on beautiful wooden surfboards …Good
luck trying to sell the idea that reed-boat-straddling Peruvians trolling
for anchovy were the first real wave-riders.”
In this short beginning, you get all Warshaw’s strengths.
He lays out some facts, puts them into a fresh context, then pops a
little bubble of surfing pretension into the bargain – without sending
the narrative off track for a word.
The entire 495 pages reads this way, as Warshaw outlines the sport’s
development in Hawaii and its subsequent spread through much of the Western
world, consistently reframing old stories and information with fresh insights,
and throwing in wicked little details only a true obsessive could spot.
Like the Swedish Surfing Association’s beginnings in the 1980s: “A
Norse fireman named Roar Berge had taken to the reefs and points near Stavanger.”
Go, Roar!
Or did you know, for example, that a deaf lifeguard called LeRoy Columbo
rented boards made from inflatable rubber tubes and heavy canvas to tourists
in Galveston, Texas, in the 1930s?
LeRoy, by the way, was later named in the Guinness Book of Records
as “the World’s Greatest Lifeguard”.
Take that, Eddie Aikau.
Warshaw – or perhaps the publisher, being US-based – shows a slight
but clear bias toward the American West Coast surfing experience.
The first 10 pages of the book, for example, feature a series of double
page photographs of, you guessed it, American surfers: riding Pipe, riding
Baja, on the beach at Westside Oahu, sitting on the wall at Santa Monica,
riding wood boards at Palos Verdes, capped off by a contents page shot
of Hobie Alter’s board shop in Dana Point in the late ‘50s.
Yep, they’ve done it all, folks.
To be fair, Warshaw makes conscious efforts against this bias, carefully
relating the start of surfing in places like Japan, and where they fit
in the global picture, and being equally careful to explain (and credit)
Australia’s numerous leaps ahead of the surfing world at large.
And almost never does he fall for any of the great West Coast surfing
myths…including one M. Dora, Malibu’s very own Rebel Without A Cause: “Dora
loved to criticize anything having to do with organised surfing, but that
didn’t prevent him from showing up on contest day when the mood struck,”
he writes of the 1967 Malibu Invitational.
Yet somehow, almost every shift and move in the sport ends up framed
in Californian surf culture.
Sometimes this is necessary, appropriate, and even pretty goddam funny,
as when Warshaw takes us on a trip into the rebirth of longboarding, well
and truly happening among baby-boomers on the US West Coast as early as
1981. “For the first time ever, the sport had a middle-aged – and generally
upper-middle-class – market,” he writes.
“Lawyers, real estate agents, and middle managers hit it hard on the
weekends before their kids’ soccer games … Veneration of old surfers soon
hit a point where any B-lister from the fifties or sixties could now be
addressed as a ‘legend.’”
He builds the description of the late 1940s and ‘50s along that seminal
surfing coast in a way that really lets us see its importance to the approaching
explosion of surfing worldwide.
Without guys like Bob Simmons, Dale Velzy, Joe Quigg, Matt Kivlin,
and Phil Edwards, it’s bloody hard to imagine how Nat, McTavish, Greenough,
Hakman and Dick Brewer could’ve gone where they did.
Other times it feels out of proportion with actual events.
Long slabs about that great Californian obsession, Mavericks, are not
parallelled with any description at all of the pioneering, gold-rush exploitation
and general impact on the global surf community of the Mentawais – a modern
surf fable of uniquely telling dimensions, which could have brought depth
to the slightly rushed feel of the last 70 pages or so.
Huntington’s imported noserider David Nuuhiwa is explained at considerable
length; Eddie Aikau gets two half-columns, written in a tone that leads
you to suspect Warshaw doesn’t quite get his place in the scheme of things.
In these and a few other areas, especially concerning the past 30 years
or so, the book’s focus seems a little too intensely focused on spectacle
at the expense of story; Teahupo’o is a heavy surf spot, sure, but page
after page of Laird Hamilton’s “Millennium Wave” doesn’t tell you much
about the surfers of Tahiti, who actually learned to surf the spot 15 years
before without a jetski or an elite camera crew on hand.
But these are smallish holes to pick in such a massive effort.
The truth is that over the past couple of decades, as more and more
of its past has come to light, surfing’s grown too big for any one writer’s
efforts.
Excellent as it is, this History can’t possibly cover the kind of ground
Nat once thought he had to himself.
500 pages is no longer enough.
Warshaw’s book is best bought, read and seen for what it is: a superb,
unmatched framing of the sport’s historical arc, and a starting point for
all the stories behind it."
| 1996
Werner, Doug : Longboarder's Start-Up : A Guide to Longboard Surfing Start Up Sports/Tracks Publishing 140 Brightwood Avenue, Chula Vista, California, CA 91910. 1996 Soft cover, 160 pages, black and white photographs, black and white photograph sequences, black and white illustrations, Glossary, Resources, Bibliography, Index. Review Longboard edition of Werner's Surfer's Start-Up : A Beginner's Guide to Surfing, 1993. See second edition, 1999, below. Intensive instructional book concentrating on basic and advanced manouvers. Design features are discussed in an interview with Bill Stewart and Henry Ford of Stewart Surfboards, pages 119 to 136. Classic longboarders may find Bob McTavish's Malibu Repetoire circa 1966 of interest... Bob McTavish is in this wave. He probably had a plan to get out of it. This copy, courtesy of Shoalhaven City Library. |
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| 1978
Whitman, John B.: An Account of the Sandwich Islands: The Hawaiian Journal of John B. Whitman, 1813-1815. Topgallant Publishing Company, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1979. and Peabody Museum of Salem, Salem, Massachusetts,1979. Hard cover, xx pages. Review For extracts see: 1813 John B. Whitman :Hawaiian Journal. |
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| 2000
Williamson, Luke: Gone Surfing - The Golden Years of Surfing in New Zealand, 1950 -1970 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand. 2000 Soft cover, pages, colour photographs, black and white photographs, various magazine, poster and advertising reproductions, Glossary, Thank You (Credits). Review Excellent early history of New Zealand boardriding with a healthy concentration on board design and manufacture. Unfortunately makes no account of prone craft and some interesting New Zealand designs such as the Levine (a hollow timber board available in kit form, circa 1959) and the Tinkler tail (1976, outside the historical parameters) are absent. |
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| 2003
Willis, Clint (editor): Big Wave- Stories of Riding the World's Widest Water Adrenaline Thunder Mouth Press An imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Incorporated 161 William Street, 16th floor New York, NY 10038 Soft cover, 316 pages, Acknowledgements, Permissions, Bibliography. Review A collection of surf stories or surfer profiles from a selection of professional American writers. Half are selections from widely available books that are included in the surfresearch.com.au bibliography, for example Daniel Duane, Greg Noll, Jack London, John Grissim and Matt Warshaw. The remainder are reprints of magazine articles such as Outside and The Surfer's Journal. |
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| 1979
Wilson, Jack Australian Surfing and Life Saving Rigby Limited, Melbourne, Sydney, Australia .,1979 Hard cover, pages, 29 colour photographs (plates), 75 black and white photographs, 7 black and white illustrations. Surfing photographs by Bruce Channon/Surfing World Review |
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| 1980
Winter, Peter : 70 Years On Greenmount The Review |
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Rod at My Paipo Boards and... More,
notes:
"The paipo rider in front of Young
is Jeff Callaghan, confirmed by both Rocky Hall and Jeff Callaghan."
http://mypaipoboards.org/mags/magazines.shtml#Surf_International
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| home | catalogue | history | references | appendix |