When skateboarders skate they experience a euphoric rush. They have a clear mind and the ability to see with the heart. The many principals that apply to skateboarding fit into a framework for how we approach, process, problem solve, persist, and overcome the challenges and hardships of living. This book offers you the opportunity to experience the great wisdom which is equally poignant in life as it is in the street or the skate park.

This was channeled from Lao Tzu through me to give modern understanding to his historical knowledge. The meter was carefully selected to keep as close to possible the original intent. May it serve you, your family, your loved ones and all of humanity.My hope is that after reading this you will become better, more loving, more tolerant people who happen to enjoy rolling through life on 4 wheels, some steel and a piece of wood.

Danny Way The Unauthorized Biography, shares the story of skateboarding legend and X Games Champion Danny Way. Way's story is one of perseverance, determination, strength, innovation and progression. From his troubled childhood to his heroic and astonishing world records (including jumping The Great Wall of China on a skateboard), beating career ending and life threatening injuries (such as a broken neck), as well as his diverse interests off a skateboard, makes his a story of a creative, courageous, and unique talent. Danny Way's triumphant tale is that of a skateboarder's rise to success and unimaginable progression during the sport's early days in California up to present day. This unauthorized biography covers Danny Way's professional skate career, records, injuries, life challenges, accomplishments, family, friends, influences, and more. Joseph David Clark began skateboarding in the mid 1970's. He skates with his sons at both a private indoor park and outdoor parks throughout the year. He is the host of a talk radio program about persevering through life challenges and making a reality of one's goals. He has written 8 books including The Tao of Skateboarding A Skateboarder's Philosophy On Life. Mr. Clark lives with his wife and children on their hobby farm just outside of Toronto, Canada.

In the tradition of Barbarian Days, a memoir in essays of Kyle Beachy's decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old. In August of 2011, writing professor and aspiring novelist Kyle Beachy published his first essay on skate culture, a brutal takedown of Nike's scorched-earth tactics which had gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. It would not be his last. For a decade and counting, Beachy has been skate culture's freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime Beachy first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood. What is skateboarding? What does it mean to still skate at forty, four decades after the kickflip was first invented? How does one live like an adult while engaging in an activity and lifestyle that are fundamentally childish? How does having a passion like skateboarding, which breaks bones, abrades skin, and takes as much as it gives, shape one's understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married? In the tradition of William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, THE MOST FUN THING approaches universal truths though a deep exploration of a specific subject. It is a rich account of Beachy's struggle to pin down the meaning of the pastime that became his life's greatest obsession, and to find a place for it in an increasingly complicated life as an adult, a professor, and a husband.

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.

"Intellectually deft and lively to read, Skate Life is an important addition to the literature on youth cultures, contemporary masculinity, and the role of media in identity formation." ---Janice A. Radway, Northwestern University, author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature "With her elegant research design and sophisticated array of anthropological and media studies approaches, Emily Chivers Yochim has produced one of the best books about race, gender, and class that I have read in the last ten years. In a moment where celebratory studies of youth, youth subcultures, and their relationship to media abound, this book stands as a brilliantly argued analysis of the limitations of youth subcultures and their ambiguous relationship to mainstream commercial culture." ---Ellen Seiter, University of Southern California "Yochim has made a valuable contribution to media and cultural studies as well as youth and American studies by conducting this research and by coining the phrase 'corresponding cultures,' which conceptualizes the complex and dynamic processes skateboarders employ to negotiate their identities as part of both mainstream and counter-cultures." ---JoEllen Fisherkeller, New York University Skate Life examines how young male skateboarders use skate culture media in the production of their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim offers a comprehensive ethnographic analysis of an Ann Arbor, Michigan, skateboarding community, situating it within a larger historical examination of skateboarding's portrayal in mainstream media and a critique of mainstream, niche, and locally produced media texts (such as, for example, Jackass, Viva La Bam, and Dogtown and Z-Boys). The book uses these elements to argue that adolescent boys can both critique dominant norms of masculinity and maintain the power that white heterosexual masculinity offers. Additionally, Yochim uses these analyses to introduce the notion of "corresponding cultures," conceptualizing the ways in which media audiences both argue with and incorporate mediated images into their own ideas about identity. In a strong combination of anthropological and media studies approaches, Skate Life asks important questions of the literature on youth and provides new ways of assessing how young people create their identities. Emily Chivers Yochim is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts, Allegheny College. Cover design by Brian V. Smith