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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but 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 creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
List of contents
Prologue: Memory Screen
1. Since Day One
2. Photosynthesis
3. Video Days
4. Shackle Me Not
5. Beautiful Mutants
Epilogue: This Is Skateboarding
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Jonathan Russell Clark is a writer and critic living in the United States. He is the author of Skateboard in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series (2022) and An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (2018). He has written about film for Esquire, LitHub, and Read It Forward. He has also written for the New York Times Book Review, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, and others.
Summary
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
How did the skateboard go from a menacing fad to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers this question by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise to worldwide juggernaut possible. Skateboarders are their own historians, which means the real history of skating exists not in archives or texts but 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 creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Foreword
A fast-paced tour through the history of the skateboard, from a surfer fad to a public nuisance to an Olympic sport, told by some of the world’s best and most fascinating skaters.
Report
This book is super tiny and will fit in the back pocket of some too-big-for-you jeans. . . . If you were the smart kid in your high school English class, read Skateboard. Jenkem Magazine
