Skateboard (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Jonathan Russell Clark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 150136748X ISBN 13: 9781501367489

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

How did the skateboard go from a fad like the hula-hoop to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark's Skateboard answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters and company owners and manufacturers who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. As the stuntwood (as it’s often referred to) has never had, like other sports and subjects, dedicated historians who recorded down relevant and important information as skateboarding progress, the real history of skating exists in a hodgepodge of random and iconic videos, tattered photographs, and, mostly, in the blurry memories of the people who lived through it all. From California beaches to Tokyo 2020, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of innovation, persistence, and camaraderie.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author

Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and critic living in the United States. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (2018). His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Vulture, L.A. Times, and numerous others. He has an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA. He has been a theater critic in Boston, a co-founder of a shadow puppet theater company, and a guitarist in a gypsy jazz band. He has skateboarded for 27 years.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 150136748X
• ISBN 13: 9781501367489
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160