The Answer Is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World

by Jocko Weyland

From the hard-ridden half-pipe of a suburban driveway to teens doing boardslides down stairway handrails in Rio de Janeiro, from the bright-light glare of ESPN's X-Games to the groundbreaking street-skating videos of Spike Jonze, skateboarding has taken the world by storm -- and if you can't deal with that, get out of the way. In The Answer Is Never, skating journalist Jocko Weyland tells the rambunctious story of a rebellious sport that began as a wintertime surfing substitute on the streets of Southern California beach towns more than forty years ago and has evolved over the decades to become a fixture of urban youth culture around the world. Merging the historical development of the sport with passages about his own skating adventures in such wide-ranging places as Hawaii, Germany, and Cameroon, Weyland gives a fully realized portrait of a subculture whose love of free-flowing creativity and a distinctive antiauthoritarian worldview has inspired major trends in fashion, music, art, and film. Along the way, Weyland interweaves the stories of skating pioneers like Gregg Weaver and the Dogtown Z-Boys and living legends like Steve Caballero and Tony Hawk. He also charts the course of innovations in deck, truck, and wheel design to show how the changing boards changed the sport itself, enabling new tricks as skaters moved from the freestyle techniques that dominated the early days to the extreme street-skating style of today. Vivid and vibrant, The Answer Is Never is a fascinating book as radical and unique as the sport it chronicles.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Sports, Biography

272 pages, Paperback

First published August 21, 2002

About the author

Jocko Weyland (b. 1967) is an American artist and writer living in New York. The author of The Answer is Never (Grove, 2002) and various articles and stories published in Thrasher, The New York Times, Cabinet and Apartamento, amongst others, he is also the creator of Elk.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A suprisingly well-researched and dare-I-say-it "literate" book about the history of an unrefined (at its best) activity and its subcultural implications. Wyland was fortuitous enough to be present at some pivotal moments in skateboarding's evolutionary big leap in the 1980's, Mike McGill's unveiling of the the McTwist, for example, as well as living in oft-dreamed of skate meccas in his formative years thanks to willingly mobile parents. The Answer is Never is more than just a detailed and intriguing coming-of-age autobiography, it also fashions some worthy arguments about culture, sociology, commodification, art/social movements, etc. that help to put an activity like skateboarding into a much-wider, and often ironic, context of human expression and experience. Recommended for anyone who skates, has skated, or is interested in fun-loving, non-comformist, physical expression of the modern sort.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you want a good solid history of the skateboarding world, this is a great place to start. It doesn't quite read like a text book but, it doesn't quite read like a novel either.
Certainly not boring but intensly griping either.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love skateboarding and punk, so I loved this book. Mixture of personal memoir and history of the sport. Could benefit from a little editing but it was still damn enjoyable simply from the content covered.

[Justin Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about the history of skateboarding. It explains what skaters had to deal with and where they skated. Also it tells how skateboarding got started and who started it.

[Levi Hawken · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just totally related to this, i'm a generation out but history repeats, i drew great inspiration from this book.

[Marye odom · Rating 5 out of 5]

More validation that it's perfectly fine to be an old skater. And an eye opener to anyone who's ever wondered why people get so into skateboarding in the first place.

[Vezlandia Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another book I've intended to finish for a couple of years. I really like the author, but just need to set aside the time as a summer read. Reading this then watching "Fruit of the Vine" would be perfect.

[Noah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've been on the lookout for a good book about skateboarding history and culture, but I doubt this is it. The prose in this book was so excruciating I couldn't even make it past page 50. Maybe it hits its stride later, but I ran out of patience.

[Thommy · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazingly spot on...

[Duvene · Rating 1 out of 5]

I find myself wanting to read this all the way through. But I get bored so I put it down & find something else. It's not a terrible book, I just can't get into it.

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book.

[Paul Westwood]

I didn't write a review of this when I first read it so now four or five years later I don't know what I thought about it.