Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR • Southwest Review • Electric Literature Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old. In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married? Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy—and what it continues to teach him as he strugglesto find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.

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This book explores the cultural, social, spatial, and political dynamics of skateboarding, drawing on contributions from leading international experts across a range of disciplines, such as sociology and philosophy of sport, architecture, anthropology, ecology, cultural studies, sociology, geography, and other fields. Part I critiques the ethos of skateboarding, its cultures and scenes, global trajectory, and the meanings it holds. Part II critically examines skateboarding in terms of space and sites, and Part III explores shifts that have occurred in skateboarding’s history around mainstreaming, commercialization, professionalization, neoliberalization and creative cities.

From skateboarding's distant origins in the 1940s to the heyday of the Z-Boys to Tony Hawk's lifelong and lucrative career as a professional skateboarding icon, this book showcases what skateboarding was in the past and what it's now evolved into. In the last half century, skateboarding has evolved from a simple, idyllic child's pastime that originated in southern California to becoming a worldwide youth culture phenomenon. This now-mainstream action sport has spawned a multi-billion-dollar commercial market for skateboarding equipment, skateboard-related media and entertainment, as well as skate-inspired softgoods like clothing, shoes, and accessories; and it is likely to soon become an Olympic sport. Skateboarding: The Ultimate Guide is brimming with fascinating history and engaging stories from skateboarding's 60-odd year existence and evolution. Covering the action sport's origins, myriad breakthrough developments, pioneering heroes, both "street style" and "vert" or ramp skating, unique popular culture, and likely future, this book will delight anyone with an interest in this individualistic and compelling athletic pursuit.

Increasing the visability of under-represented girl skateboarders, these portraits are captured on location with the photographic historical process, wet plate collodion using a portable darkroom and 8x10 view camera.

This book explores the ways in which religion is observed, performed, and organised in skateboard culture. Drawing on scholarship from the sociology of religion and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports, this work combines ethnographic research with media analysis to argue that the rituals of skateboarding provide participants with a rich cultural canvas for emotional and spiritual engagement. Paul O’Connor contends that religious identification in skateboarding is set to increase as participants pursue ways to both control and engage meaningfully with an activity that has become an increasingly mainstream and institutionalised sport. Religion is explored through the themes of myth, celebrity, iconography, pilgrimage, evangelism, cults, and self-help.