<p><b>The thinking-person's guide to surfing and the world it has created.</b><br> <br>Among the most popular courses at the University of California at Santa Barbara is a team-taught lecture series on the history of surfing that immerses students in the cultural, political, economic, and environmental consequences of surfing's evolution from a sport of Hawaiian kings and queens to a billion-dollar worldwide industry. Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul bring more than sixty years of experience in the water to the class and are not surprised by the class’s popularity – UC Santa Barbara is, after all, a surfing school. The real surprise is that their non-surfing students outnumber the surfers. There is something about surfing that people yearn to understand – and this is the book that examines the enduring worldwide appeal of the sport both in myth and reality.<br><br> Drawing on the authors' expertise as, respectively, a historian of science and technology and an environmental historian, <i>The World in the Curl</i> brings alive the colorful history of surfing by drawing readers into the forces that have fueled the sport's expansion: colonialism, the military-industrial complex, globalization, capitalism, and race and gender roles. In a highly readable and provocative narrative history of the sport's signal moments – from the spread of surfing to the US, to the development of surf culture, to big-wave frontiers, to the reintroduction of women into the sport – Neushul and Westwick draw an indelible portrait of surfing and surfers as actors on the global stage.</p>