From the hard-ridden half-pipe of a suburban driveway to teens doing
boardslides down stairway handrails in Rio de Janeiro, from the
bright-light glare of ESPN's X-Games to the groundbreaking
street-skating videos of Spike Jonze, skateboarding has taken the world
by storm -- and if you can't deal with that, get out of the way. In The
Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious
story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing
substitute on the streets of Southern California beach towns more than
forty years ago and has evolved over the decades to become a fixture of
urban youth culture around the world. Merging the historical development
of the sport with passages about his own skating adventures in such
wide-ranging places as Hawaii, Germany, and Cameroon, Weyland gives a
fully realized portrait of a subculture whose love of free-flowing
creativity and a distinctive antiauthoritarian worldview has inspired
major trends in fashion, music, art, and film. Along the way, Weyland
interweaves the stories of skating pioneers like Gregg Weaver and the
Dogtown Z-Boys and living legends like Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. He
also charts the course of innovations in deck, truck, and wheel design
to show how the changing boards changed the sport itself, enabling new
tricks as skaters moved from the freestyle techniques that dominated the
early days to the extreme street-skating style of today. Vivid and
vibrant, The Answer Is Never is a fascinating book as radical and unique
as the sport it chronicles.
