My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.
-Malcolm X
THE REVIEW
WELCOME TO PARADISE, NOW GO TO HELL
A True Story of Violence, Corruption, and the Soul of Surfing
by Chas Smith
KIRKUS REVIEW
The clown prince of "trash prose" cracks the coconut-wireless wide open in a hip exposé of Hawaii's North Shore surfing culture.
Each year, the best surfers in the world converge on Oahu's North Shore for a chance to get "barreled" by the world-famous Bonzai Pipeline. There are riches to be won and legends to be created for all those fortunate enough to survive the monster wave's curling caress. But that's only the frothy, foamy surface of this story. According to Smith, ex–war correspondent and adventure writer and current “editor-at-living-large” of Surfing magazine, a much grimier truth exists far beyond dreamy visions of swaying palm trees and hula girls dispensing fragrant leis to wide-eyed tourists. Basically seen through the lens of a single day covering a high-stakes surfing showdown, Smith paints an oppressive, although darkly amusing, landscape of ramshackle frat houses and hair-trigger Hawaiians with punishing "Toyota Land Cruiser–sized" arms. The ultimate insider, the author spends his days tiptoeing around the island's nativist elite and trying hard to remember the etiquette that will spare him from being "slapped" or "choked out." The droll personal narrative, evocative of Hunter S. Thompson at times, entertains, while superior reporting informs and illuminates much about the surf industry's peculiar machinations, its cavalcade of sun-bleached heroes and the troubled history of Hawaii itself. "I will always remember that first trip to the North Shore,” he writes. “It seemed run down. It seemed unkempt. It seemed used. It seemed rotten. It was not the gilded expanse of my imagination. It was rough and dirty.” Effortlessly shifting from the profound to the profane, and back again, Smith is alternately self-reverential and self-mocking in tone but totally engrossed in the "madness" that ensues every winter when "the pipe is pumping.”
A boozy and often funny investigation into a little-understood corner of America.
Pub Date:Dec. 1st, 2013
ISBN:978-0-06-220252-9
Page count:256pp
Publisher:It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online:Oct. 20th, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue:Nov. 1st, 2013
THE LIST
Banned Books Public Domain
These are books that have been commonly banned over the years, and are also now in the public domain.
In other words, they are the ultimate paradox: freely available to billions on the Internet, yet still attempts are made to control them.
Some sources for information include Banned Books Online, the ALA lists of frequently banned and challenged books, and Wikipedia banned books.
For more information on what falls under public domain, consult Project Gutenberg or Wikipedia's information.
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