Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results

Thinking this book was mainly about surfing and surf culture I was surprised, happily, to find it covers much, much more. It's fascinating, enjoyable, informative and great fun to read. I would recommend it to just about everyone!

I wrote this review for San Francisco Magazine. The king of Morocco institutes a surf school to combat Islamic radicals. Punks in Munich dodge local police to surf urban rivers. A Cali fornian doctor sneaks surfboards into Palestine for the Gaza Surf Club. What's happening here? When you think about America's global pop-culture influence, Beyoncé, George Clooney, and Michael Jordan come to mind long before Kelly Slater. But journ alist, avid surfer, and former SF Weekly theater critic Michael Scott Moore does a fine job of arguing that surfing--yes, as in Point Break--may be our country's most influential cultural export. (The sport is Polynesian in origin, but its modern incarnation is distinctly American.) Moore travels to unlikely surf destin ations worldwide, dredging up fascinating historical tidbits and interviews, many of which debunk long-held myths: For example, the first surfers to ride waves in Indonesia were not Australian hippies in the '60s but an American couple, Bob and Louise Koke, in 1936. You don't necessarily come away from Moore's book convinced of his thesis, but his irreverent style and diligent research capture a truer--and sometimes darker--aspect of the surfer's sacred search for the perfect wave. A- --JAIMAL YOGIS, author of Saltwater Buddha

In Michael Scott Moore's clued-in and far-flung "Sweetness and Blood," the border guard, so to speak, exchanges his military uniform for baggy shorts and a rash vest. The surfer who came in from the cold. Trabants out, woodies in. On Moore's post-cold-war surfari, every one is now a beach bum, no one is bummed, anybody can surf anytime, anywhere, from Cuba to Morocco, from the Gaza Strip to Japan. Of course, the Siberian waves aren't too hot. And personally, I still require palm trees and a sultry breeze before I paddle out. But Moore and a robust wet suit have boldly gone where only serious and often seriously unhinged dudes have gone before, mapping out a fresh, unexpected cartography of the waves. The literature of surfing takes off in the late 18th century, with the voyages of Capt. James Cook. Cook couldn't even swim, much less surf, which perhaps explains why the Hawaiian watermen eventually did to him exactly what his name seemed to be recommending. But not before one of his crew declared surfing "the most supreme pleasure." It was the kind of utopianism that seeped even into the French Revolution, though it was tempered by the guillotine. The tradition of the surf bard extolling the exploits of ace riders goes right back to the origins of surfing, a millennium or so ago, in the islands of Polynesia. It was never enough just to go surfing: you had to hype it up, too. Moore is a modern surf troubadour, singing the adventures of a cast of eccentric pioneers, not to mention Agatha Christie (whose surf writing had hitherto escaped me) and the Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who becomes a kind of honorary surfer by virtue of having been an individualist and dissident who spent time in jail. The classic lexicon of "epic," "insane" and "gnarly" is mostly set aside here. Highly imperfect waves abound. The closing line of the book, quoting a Japanese surfer, "Paddle, paddle -- and sometimes, big wave come!," sounds like "Waiting for Godot" with (or rather without) waves. Moore, an itinerant American who lives in Berlin and writes for Spiegel Online International, writes in a spirit closer to Bruce Chatwin's "In Patagonia" than to the latest issue of Carve.

As a my foreign correspondent in 2005, Michael Scott Moore showed how events in Europe connected with what happened in Cambridge, Mass., and the United States in general. Before then, when he lived here -- I'm still in the Boston area, in Cambridge -- he was that guy you saw getting on the red line with a surfboard under his arm. He would take commuter rail up the North Shore, always with a wetsuit to handle the New England chill and slushy waters of Cape Ann and a ready explanation for the curious and amused: There's surfing in Massachusetts. There's surfing just about everywhere. It makes sense, then, that his second book, just released in hardcover by Rodale, is "Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, with Some Unexpected Results." Indonesia, Germany, Morocco, the Gaza Strip, Japan -- he surfs them all, and more, in writing this second book (his first nonfiction; he also has a novel, "Too Much of Nothing"), but this is not a guidebook to great waves or a smirking reveal of who's wearing baggies under their burka. Moore combines travelogue, reportage, history and cultural analysis into nine smooth essays of novelty, character and insight. Surfing in Munich, for instance, is done on the swift-flowing waters of the Eisbach canal, technically illegal and eminently dangerous, and the chapter in Germany is lightly haunted by fatality and a condemnation of fun-gesellschaft, the business of fun that floated in with U.S. culture. (Moore also rides the Severn Bore in England, a tidal surge that comes along every 12 hours -- but if you wipe out, you can drive downriver faster than the wave and try again.) The surfing in Indonesia takes place against a background of poverty and luxury resorts and Islamic extremism versus democracy, but looks also at how Indonesians can be enthusiastic surfers despite a disturbing lack of skill as swimmers. There's also a bit of debunking going on. Readers meet the man who would be Moondoggie from "Gidget," and may not enjoy the experience, and learn why a fundamental piece of surf literature, Tom Wolfe's "The Pump House Gang," demands a reappraisal. "The number of facts Wolfe manages to flub is astonishing," Moore writes of a New Journalism icon who "liked to pose as a wise but hip writer who could saunter into any subculture and give the lowdown to the squares." Moore doesn't need a pose. He's been surfing since he was in his teens, and he's able to dive into exotic settings around the world because he's already essentially submerged in the culture. Meaning he arrives with an appreciation for the ocean and the roots of "localism," the sometimes brutal protection of waves from "the kooks who vacation with expensive wetsuits and no instinct for waves, who bring a sense of entitlement to match their general lack of clue, who clutter up the water with slick new boards but no obvious respect for the sea -- not to mention for the locals next to them." Having observed

I admittedly grew up in So Cal (probably around the same time as the author) going to Malibu and Zuma and then the South Bay and OC beaches as I got older. I have always had a special place in my heart for surfing. I love to watch the ocean and I love sports, so surfing is a natural for me. I am interested in books about surfing legends such as Eddie Aikau, Duke Kahanamoku and the like, so this book interested me. This story didn't really play out the way I sort of expected it to. I was expecting more of a hard and serious history of surfing. I am glad it didn't turn out that way, because this book is really like a guy telling his buds about what he saw on his travels around the world while researching surfing, and how comical that can be. I read this book sitting outside next to my pool (no ocean here, bummer) and it was very entertaining reading. I really had no idea of surfing outside of the "civilized" world, and that people in Germany surf in a canal. I was so entertained by the detailed stories from the Moroccan people. I guess what this book is really saying is that surfers all over the world are of the same tribe, no matter where they live.