Surfing Books With a Radical Touch--Words

Surfing is an endeavor most difficult to describe with words. Writers--even those who surf avidly--end up sounding like cliche-spouting tourists when waxing about wave riding. Adjectives soon become yesterday’s language. And the surfing public is hard to please--quick to call out inaccuracy, exaggeration and bias. Plus, a picture can tell the story: It doesn’t take a writer to tell readers how big a wave was or how deep a rider got. Thus: surfing’s strange dependence on coffee table books to tell its history.

Two such oversized books hit the shelf recently but with a refreshing dependence on words as well as pictures.

“Stoked: A History of Surf Culture” by Drew Kampion (General Publishing Group, 216 pages, $29.95) is a much-needed book of record for 20th century surfing. The much loved but outdated and Aussie-centric “History of Surfing” by Nat Young (Palm Beach Press), last updated in 1994, served as Western surfing’s main historical text. Kampion, a longtime California surfer and surf journalist, started from scratch and re-created surfing’s story from pre-colonial Hawaii to the modern surfing industrial complex.

The writing is fluid and the research is engaging. All the while, Kampion keeps a keen perspective on surfing’s impact on the non-surfing “legions of the un-jazzed: The surf culture that has formed concentric rings around the elemental act of riding a wave is a unique and strangely powerful phenomenon.” The photographs, collected by veteran surf photographer Art Brewer, are phenomenal and well represent the photographic history of modern surfing.

“Above the Roar: 50 Surfer Interviews” by former Surfer magazine editor Matt Warshaw (Waterhouse, 123 pages, $39.95) uses brief Q&As; to fill in the individual stories of professional surfing’s greatest athletes. It also features Q&As; with some of the other characters of surfing, such as big wave chaser and environmentalist Mark Renneker, photographer LeRoy Grannis and Surfer magazine founder John Severson. Essential for the surf-culture buff’s library.

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Danny Schechter (“the news dissector”) has been channel surfing with a critical eye for three decades. In “The More You Watch, the Less You Know” (Seven Stories, 478 pages, $26.95), he puts all his years as a media critic, television producer and media scholar to paper and tells the story of an increasingly monolithic news media more attuned to stock prices than to the watchdog role with which it has been constitutionally entrusted. He warns of a growing mediocracy of news controllers--the same “corporate democracy” that weighs in with heavy influence in Washington’s halls of power: “Today one man, Rupert Murdoch, stands on our eyes, ears and faces more than any other,” Schechter writes.

Meanwhile, “Media Rants: Postpolitics in the Digital Nation” (Hardwired, 152 pages, $13.95) by Jon Katz is a free-form look into media, culture and politics--a string of text culled from the media critic’s well-read interactive “Media Rants” column from cyberspace. Often responding to reader’s e-mail queries, Katz spares no sacred cows when it comes to politicians and the media.

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Before you buy that toy du jour, check out “Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood” by Gary Cross (Harvard University Press, 283 pages, $29.95). Cross describes how toy companies cut out the parent to market directly to children. After all, it’s an easy market to target, with indulgent parents’ pocket books only a tug away. It’s like taking candy from a baby boomer. Cross points out that it wasn’t always this way. Before World War II, toys were not the mythic, capitalistic trophies of spoiled children that they are today but rather tools of the imagination.

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“Retrohell” by the editors of Ben Is Dead magazine (Back Bay Books, 276 pages, $12.95) is yet another pop culture micropedia for those who can’t get enough. The paperback volume seems partial to the decades of Generation X’s youth. There are entries on “The Benny Hill Show,” the ‘70s revolution from “man” to “dude,” and the Rubik’s Cube.

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“The Trouser Press Record Guide” has been a staple in the libraries of pop music lovers for nearly two decades. The guide put in what the bible of record guides--”The Rolling Stone Album Guide” (Random House)--left out, and by the mid-’80s, that was a lot: It seemed that the “Album Guide” was like a staid college anthology of mythic ‘60s folk and ‘70s progressive rock. Ira A. Robbins dedicated his early Trouser Press guides--named after his defunct music magazine--to the new revolutions of punk, new wave, hip-hop and electronic pop. In the ‘90s, his guide evolved to include “alternative” rock. The fifth edition, “The Trouser Press Guide to ‘90s Rock” (Fireside, 846 pages, $24.95), is hot on the shelves with plenty of new entries, including trip-hoppers Portishead and ambient maestro Aphex Twin. Glaring absences, however, include electronic punks Prodigy and neo-modsters No Doubt. Still, it’s a giant step ahead of the “Album Guide,” which published its latest edition in 1992.

* D. James Romero reviews books on pop culture every four weeks. Next week: the current crop of magazines.