Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture

(Hardback)

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The fascinating untold story of one scientists pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, written with the compelling drama and narrative insight of Why Fish Dont Exist and The Lost City of Z.

Deep in the archives of New Yorks American Museum of Natural History sits a wardrobe filled with fifty plaster casts of human heads and faces that are a century old. How they came to be is the story of one of the most consequential, and yet least-known, encounters in the history of science.

In 1920, the museums director Henry Fairfield Osborn traveled to Hawaii on an anthropological research trip. While there, he took a surfing lesson. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically perfect, yet belonging to an imperfect race.

Upon his return to New York, Osborns fixation grew. He dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu to measure, photograph, and cast in plaster Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian people. The study touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity.

In Capturing Kahanamoku, historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating cultural history that is an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science, a warning of the pernicious and lasting impact of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification.

A heady blend of Barbarian Days and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Capturing Kahanamoku is a Victorian saga that explores very modern questions about humanity, the noble pursuit of knowledge, and dark compulsions to design nature.

Capturing Kahanamoku includes 16-20 black-and-white photos throughout.

Reviews

"Michael Rossis Capturing Kahanamoku is a haunting, quietly devastating excavation of a story we should all know but dont: how a surfing legend became the target of eugenic obsession. From the sunlit waves of Hawaii to the cold basements of American museums, Rossi reveals how race science wasnt just pseudoscienceit was performance, delusion, and erasure, carried out in the name of progress. Gorgeously written and brilliantly researched, this book is both a warning and a wonder." Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Aviator and the Showman "Capturing Kahanamokuis a riveting and timely exploration of how science, race, and power collided in the 20th century and how the echoes still reverberate today. With cinematic storytelling and meticulous research, Rossi shows how science can be manipulated to serve social ideologies and how those ideologies can, in turn, reshape science.Capturing Kahanamokuis not just a story about the past. Its a reflection on who we are, how we see each other, and the urgent need to use science responsibly; as a tool for understanding, not oppression." Dr. Heather Berlin, neuroscientist, host of the PBS Nova series Your Brain, and co-host of StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson Michael Rossi has penned one of the weirder and wilder rides in the weird and wild ride that is the history of surfing.Capturing Kahanamokuis a scientific detective story into the forgotten side of surfing, or a surfing detective story into the dark side of science. Its a troubling legacy of obsession tucked inside a tropical legend of perfectionand a saga told by Rossi with grace, rigor and ten-toes-on-the-nose. Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Impossible and West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief "A revelatory, immersive dive into the life of Duke Kahanamoku. This brilliantly rendered history compels us to reconsider our notions of physical beauty and national identity, and raises important questions about the perils of pseudoscience. Michael Rossi has cast a better likeness of the Duke than any sculptor could have dreamed." Dan Reiter, author of On a Rising Swell "[A] strange and captivating account... Rossi excels at exposing the bunk pseudoscience at the heart of eugenicists' mystical fascination with race... readers will find this a fascinating look at the painful intersection of Hawaiian and sports history with an ignominious branch of science." Publishers Weekly

Author Bio

Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America, He has written for the London Review of Books, Nature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cabinet, among other publications. At the University of Chicago, Rossi is a member of the History Department, the Committee on Historical and Conceptual Studies of Science, and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. He lives in Chicago and New York.