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Cocaine + Surfing
- A Sordid History of Surfing's Greatest Love Affair
- Narrated by: Tom Pile
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
From the author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction
It is likely not terribly surprising that surfers like to party. The 1960-'70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws. Tanned boys who refused to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water.
As the surf brands accidentally morphed into a multimillion- then multibillion-dollar industry beginning in the 1980s, however, the derelict portrait began to harm business. In order to achieve wild year-on-year growth that came to be expected, surf trunks, T-shirts and sunglasses had to be sold en masse through Midwestern mall stores. Moms in Des Moines did not want corn-fed junior to be a delinquent. And so the external surf image of the 1980s and '90s and into the present became Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton. Health, vitality, bravery, clean living, positive, and pure, with heavy doses of puritanism.
Internally, though, surfing had moved on from booze and weed to its heart's true home, its soul's twin flame. Cocaine's rise in American popular culture as the choice of rich, white elites was matched, then quadrupled, within surf culture. The parties got wilder, the nights stretched longer, the stories became more ridiculously unbelievable. And there has been no stopping, no dip in passion.
The surfer and his lover are entwined in gorgeously dysfunctional embrace. A forbidden love like Romeo and his Juliet, and few, if any, outside the insular surf world knew or know about this particular rhapsody. A byzantine ethic keeps interlopers far away. Bad behavior is also kept very well hidden, even from insiders, but evidence of psychosis rears its head from time to time. Overdoses, bar fights, surf contests, and murders and cover-ups.
Cocaine + Surfing peels the curtains back on a hopped up, sometimes sexy, sometimes deadly relationship and uses cocaine as the vehicle to expose and explain the utterly absurd surf industry to outsiders. It also explores where dreams go when they die.
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Follow the trails of hunters - the original storytellers - as they interpret signs, examine tracks, and chase and catch their prey (or fail to). Listeners can curl up with the best authentic hunting fiction and non-fiction, bringing the great Mount Kenya and the prairies of the American Bison into your living room. From Theodore Roosevelt and Gene Hill to Rick Bass and Charles Dickens, remember classic hunting tales and discover new stories of hunters’ luck, camaraderie, and use of smarts on the trail.
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A broad collection of hunting tales
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Champions aren’t born. They’re built. Greg Harden spent over 30 years building them at the University of Michigan, including 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.” Now, in his first book, Greg Harden is reaching out to help anyone who wants to live their best life by offering powerful and practical advice.
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Good book, However, prejudice shows through a bit
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Wildlife Wars
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In Wildlife Wars, Terry Grosz serves up fascinating stories - alternately hair-raising, hilarious, and heart-wrenching - from his 30-year struggle to protect wildlife in America. A natural storyteller, Grosz writes about the remarkable characters he met - on both sides of the law - as he matched wits with elk poachers, salmon snaggers, commercial-market duck hunters, and a host of other law-breakers. Best of all, though, these stories are so remarkably entertaining you won't want to put them down.
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Title should be: "reckless egomaniac tells lies"
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Playing to Win
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- Original Recording
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All over America, families are investing blood, sweat, tears, and retirement savings in their children’s sports careers, all with the ultimate goal of…what exactly? A college scholarship? A professional contract? Simply the taste of victory? Through the lens of the highly competitive world of girls’ softball, Lewis reveals the youth sports industrial complex that has arisen to aggressively monetize after-school pastimes.
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Great Listen
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Barbarian Days
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Pulitzer Prize, Biography, 2016. Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
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What a Jerk.
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Thinner Leaner Stronger
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You can get that beautiful “beach-ready” body without following a bland, boring, bodybuilding diet and without doing exhausting strength training workouts you hate. And this exercise book shows you how.
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"The Ultimate Female Body", but uses male examples
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The Spartan Way
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Joe De Sena has one ultimate goal: to help improve everyone’s physical and emotional health by teaching them the tenets of Spartan living from ancient Greece: simple eating, smart training, mastering resilience, and an all-out commitment to achieving a goal.
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Don’t know what to think...
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When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as long as Westerners have been climbing the Himalaya, Sherpas have been the unsung heroes in the background. In August 2008, when eleven climbers lost their lives on K2, the world’s most dangerous peak, two Sherpas survived. They had emerged from poverty and political turmoil to become two of the most skillful mountaineers on earth. Based on unprecedented access and interviews, Buried in the Sky reveals their astonishing story for the first time.
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Sherpas, The True Unsung Heroes
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The Betrayal
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In the most famous scandal of sports history, eight Chicago White Sox players - including Shoeless Joe Jackson - agreed to throw the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for the promise of $20,000 each from gamblers reportedly working for New York mobster Arnold Rothstein. Heavily favored, Chicago lost the Series five games to three. Although rumors of a fix flew while the series was being played, they were largely disregarded by players and the public at large.
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Great telling of a truly American story
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Where's the Next Shelter? is the true story of three travelers on the Appalachian Trail, a 2,000-mile hike that stretches from Georgia to Maine, told from the perspective of Gary Sizer, a seasoned backpacker and former marine who quickly finds himself humbled by the endeavor. If you long for the horizon or to sleep under the stars, then come along for the hike of a lifetime. All you have to do is take the first step.
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If You Liked AWOL, You'll Like This
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Ball Four
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When Ball Four was published in 1970, it created a firestorm. Bouton was called a Judas, a Benedict Arnold and a “social leper” for having violated the “sanctity of the clubhouse.” Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying the book wasn’t true. Ballplayers, most of whom hadn’t read it, denounced the book. It was even banned by a few libraries. Almost everyone else, however, loved Ball Four.
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Three Ten Year Updates Give Bouton a 5th Star
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The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing
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The biggest paradox in golf is that the harder you try to hit the ball, the worse you do so. In The Keys to the Effortless Golf Swing, Michael McTeigue offers you a simple system of sequential body movements that produces a true swinging motion with every club in the bag. The result is increased distance and greater accuracy for all sizes, shapes, and ages of golfers for a minimum investment in learning time.
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My Swing
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What listeners say about Cocaine + Surfing
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mark W
- 06-21-18
Honest sarcasm, refreshing storytelling
Surfing is the thing for huge numbers of us. The author’s all out approach to a search for ruthless truth about the industry, drugs and surf stardom is more or less perfect. If you’re a surfer, you’ll be entertained from the start. If you’re not, you don’t matter any way. Enjoy.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Joshua Nykamp
- 07-13-18
Pretty funny
I went into it not expecting much, I've only really read one good book on surfing. Chas was really funny, there was a point where I got a little annoyed because it seemed to much like trying to sound like Hunter S Thompson. I'm glad I made it to the end though because Chas did stich it together and it really had a point. Overall pretty fun and it'll make you laugh.
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- ryinside
- 07-20-18
good listen
a few sections were clunky but overall fun and thought provoking. audible reader should have learned how to pronounce surf terms though
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- Jimmy P
- 08-24-18
Narrator
Narrator can’t pronounce surf terms, brands, names or locations
Story of the death of real surfing— caused by surf industry is a excellent.
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3 people found this helpful
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- C G
- 06-23-18
Great Book!
enjoyed the content but the Narrator sounded like a kook. Definitely no pterigium. Nice to hear to here the truth about drug use and what really goes on. Kids should understand what their heroes are all about for better and worse. Fucking surfers, fucking Cocaine.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Julian Orr
- 09-17-23
Entertaining / interesting
Hunter S Thompson-esque journalist/essayist take on the surf world. Appreciate the role this guy takes poking the surf industry bears
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- Kyle Douglas
- 01-13-19
Narrator is a joke caricature of what the public t
Narrator is a joke caricature of what the public perceives of surfers. Fake cool guy action sports voice. It's ironic as chapter 2 is all about how Hollywood gets it wrong and does this very thing when incorporating surf into films. The guy pronounced "poke", referencing fish poke, as "pōk" like to jab. However, I discovered that when you increase the playback speed to 1.5x it becomes more palatable and I could continue. I'm thinking the author did not have a say in selecting this kook narrator.
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3 people found this helpful
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- W
- 08-12-20
Chill, Narrator chill...
Whoa! The story opens with the narrator bolting out of the gate like a lunatic reporter who never surfed or used coke, but decided to do both while narrating this book. Sheeee. Nope. Book was cool and fun to “read” but really hard to get away from the narrator’s ego.
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- Robert
- 09-13-18
Chas is a self-proclaimed douche but the guy can write.
I finished it in two days. Couldn’t put it down. I find Chas Smith to be a bit of a jerk on surfsplendor’s Grit podcast but the guy can write. It’s a pretty loose story, wandering like Kerouac through surf history and his own narcissistic stream of consciousness, but it’s so fun and, at times, laugh-out-loud hilarious. I finished it thinking, Really...that’s it?, but if I’m honest I’ll probably listen to it again.
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- Ingrid Adams
- 07-15-23
Tom Pile, sounds like one big Pile
I own the hard copy. The book itself is great. enthralling story of Surfings strange history and it’s endemic ties, from the perspective of someone who is on the inside of It’s culture looking outward giving a much needed perspective shift of the normal narrated history of surfing. It’s written with a learning curve for people who know nothing about surfing too.
The narrated performance is so god awful it makes the book almost unlistenable. From poor half thought out pronunciation, lack of understanding of Acronyms, to even really simple words that are common through all of America.
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