Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results

An elegant and surprising history of surfing that examines its cultural influence in some of the most unexpected places
How did an obscure tribal sport from precolonial Hawaii—one that was nearly eliminated on its home islands by Christian missionaries—jump oceans to California and Australia? And how did it become such a worldwide passion, influencing lives around the globe?
In this brilliantly written travel adventure, journalist and surfer Moore visits unlikely surfing destinations —Gaza, West Africa, North England, Berlin, Bali, Japan, Cuba, and Morocco—to give the reader a folk history of surfing. This is a personal sketch for any curious reader of how the modern sport moved around the world and mingled with cultures that either have nothing to do with Hawaii or have strong reasons to resist pop silliness from the First World. The result is the story of hippies, soldiers, nutcases, and colonialism; a checkered history of the spread of Western culture in the years after World War II.
Moore brings to his subject a sense of adventure and relevance that will appeal to surfers and nonsurfers alike.

Michael Scott Moore is a European correspondent for Miller-McCune magazine and the author of a novel, Too Much of Nothing. He's written on politics and travel for publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Financial Times, and Spiegel Online International, where he also serves as editor-at-large. He lives in Berlin, Germany---oddly, for a surfer---and runs a Web site at radiofreemike.com.