This is about as far as we’re going to go with the whole Christmas Gift Guide idea. Four books: two for people who like to read and two for people who like to look at pictures. Word books first.
Welcome To Paradise Now Go To Hell
by Chas Smith
In his debut book Welcome To Paradise, Now Go To Hell writer, editor, filmmaker, and handsome father Chas Smith weaves many of his best surf story lines into a tale of surfing (and violence) on the North Shore of Oahu. Its centerpiece is the story of Smith being verbally assaulted by world champion Mick Fanning and the shit-storm that his reporting of that incident caused. But there’s also more about surfing in general, the North Shore, Hawaiian history, and just how much Chas Smith the writer admires Chas Smith the man. We couldn’t stop turning the pages once we started and ended up reading it straight through. We guessing you will, too. It’s good.
TC
By Nick Carroll
This tell-all surf memoir is the “autobiography” of the two-time ASP world surfing champion Tom Carroll written by respected surf journalist and editor (and Tom’s brother) Nick Carroll. It’s a family book. It’s a surf book. Here’s the official pitch:
On the surface he was Tom Carroll, dreamer, cheeky grommet, brilliant surfer, Australian sporting hero, fitness fanatic, businessman, family man, big wave charger. Inside turned the terrible wheel of drug addiction, part family curse, part legacy of the footloose surf culture he’d done so much to legitimize. Tom’s family and friends struggled with him, kept his secrets, and looked on in anger and fear as the wheel began to grind him down. Then a window opened, but getting through it made charging Pipeline look like a piece of cake. This is the story of an unlikely moral education: of humility, family, damage, brotherhood, youth, stupidity, glory, single-mindedness, and surrender, and about the feeling of water moving under a surfboard, how it can bind past to present and make sense of lives.
For the picture books, follow the jump.
Locals Only
Photos by Hugh Holland
Ammobooks.com
According to Ammobooks:
One afternoon in 1975, a young photographer named Hugh Holland drove up Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Los Angeles and encountered skateboarders carving up the drainage ditches along the side of the canyon. Immediately transfixed by their grace and athleticism, he knew he had found an amazing subject. Although not a skateboarder himself, for the next three years Holland never tired of documenting skateboarders surfing the streets of Los Angeles, parts of the San Fernando Valley, Venice Beach, and as far away as San Francisco and Baja California, Mexico.
Distant Shores
Photos by Chris Burkhard
Ammobooks.com
From Ammo Books:
Chris Burkard’s photographs are punctuated by energized landscapes and moments of bliss, by adventure seeking and the lifestyle that it encompasses, and by movement and intuitive light-working capabilities. With the ocean as his main muse, Burkard has consistently captured this subject in timeless and expansive photographic impressions, utilizing the tool of surfing to approach the ocean’s intricate personality and then extending out to include the human personalities that draw meaning from this same source. Searching for wild, remote destinations and offbeat landscapes, Burkard portrays the humble placement of the human in contrast to nature.
