Hawaiian Surfing in the New York Times

John Clark’s Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions from the Past is the focus of today’s New York Times editorial “Big Boards, Banana Stalks, and Everybody in the Waves.” Here’s a quote:

“Two new books and a documentary film, all out this year, are reclaiming the story of surfing as Hawaiians once knew it. They are telling the neglected tale of one little world, on eight little islands—surfing before outsiders took it to California and far beyond. ‘Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions From the Past’ is the most startling of the three. . . . Tracing every reference he can find to surfing, beaches and waves in the Hawaiian language, Mr. Clark shows surfing as a social sport played on a scale unimaginable anywhere today.”

The other book mentioned in the article is UH Press’s very own Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i by Isaiah Helekunihi Walker.