Skateboard

A fast-paced tour through the history of the skateboard through the eyes of the world’s best and most fascinating skaters.

How did the skateboard go from surfer fad to public nuisance to an Olympic sport? Writer and skateboarder Jonathan Russell Clark answers by going straight to the sources: the skaters, photographers, commentators, and industry insiders who made such an unlikely rise possible. From California beaches in the 1960s to the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, the skateboard has outlasted its critics to form a global community of creativity, camaraderie, and unceasing progression.

Skateboard captures the spirit of skateboarding in all its nuance through portraits of five skaters who exemplify components of the sport. 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.

This book is the latest in the Object Lessons series. Published in association with The Atlantic, it explores the hidden lives of ordinary things and what they can teach us about ourselves and the modern world.