NONFICTION - July 21, 1991

NORTH SHORE CHRONICLES: Big-Wave Surfing in Hawaii by Bruce Jenkins (North Atlantic Books: $12.95, paper; 176 pp.). Margaret Mead would have loved this book--call it “Coming of Age in the Pipeline.” Bruce Jenkins, a sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has spent 20 months surfing the big waves of Oahu over the last 15 years, and here collects profiles and interviews with some of the North Shore’s best and wildest surfers. Each has a distinctive style--Ken Bradshaw is the blow-hard intimidator, Mark Foo the selfish technophile, Darrick Doerner the cool mystic--but all share an obsession with the sun, the water and the waves. What they don’t like is “the flakes, kooks and pretenders” (so Jenkins characterizes them) now infiltrating the sport, the Andre Agassiz-type new generation, and the money-hungry competition hounds, interested more in image than performance. Jenkins’ subjects, by contrast, consider themselves serious sportsmen, and they hate being typecast as air-headed surfer boys, though it’s easy to make that leap, for they talk in a wave-language (untranslated by Jenkins) that at times is no better than Esperanto. In the end, though, the surferspeak is quite charming; everyone could use some of their pure-stoke enthusiasm, especially when it comes to those weak youngsters with their gyro-spastic spinfests. Go for it, brudda.