A well-balanced collection of some of the best surf writing ever done.
A collection of wave-riding pieces from an industry titan.
In this volume, legendary surfing writer George collects pieces from his decades of profiling people and places for magazines like SURFER. The author states at the outset of this anthology, “I am not a writer who surfs—I am a surfer who writes,” and this self-conception gives his work a distinctive voice that made his articles must-reads for surfing fans. This volume includes perhaps his most famous piece of writing, “The Seduction of Kelly Slater,” done for SURFER magazine in 1989 (Slater provides the book’s foreword), and the material ranges widely. “Red Water,” an almost equally famous profile of Bethany Hamilton, daringly opens with the focus not on Hamilton but on the shark that bit her arm off in 2003: “With one last savage kick of her great tail, she opened her jaws in a ragged yawn, and taking the thin, pale arm in her throat, she clamped down with over sixteen tons of sawing pressure.” Taken together, these vivid pieces provide readers with a sense of the inner workings of surfing as a sport while chronicling surfing’s evolution from a scruffy hobby to a multimillion-dollar international industry. George includes many of his own arresting photos, but it’s his thrilling, thoughtful prose that brings the book to life. Readers of those now-defunct old surfing magazines who’ve kept this author’s pieces in yellowing folders all these years now have the book they’ve wished for. George is equally evocative writing about individuals (Slater being an obvious favorite, along with the sport’s famous Curren brothers) and places, as when, in “Don’t Mess with Texas,” he profiles the U.S. Amateur Surfing Championships on South Padre Island. This is sports writing well worth preserving.
A well-balanced collection of some of the best surf writing ever done.Pub Date: May 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781955690454
Page Count: 526
Publisher: Catharsis
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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