Hardback.
172 pages.
Birdwell 2019. ISBN978-0-578-48837-0
The premise of Dazzling Blue is 58 short stories "about things we do in board shorts". However when those stories are penned by master words man Jamie Brisick the end product goes waaaaay beyond that. Short easy to digest essays fill the pages; naked surfers of Malibu, hand jive, the first trip to Bali, Peter Townend, a eulogy for cinema's wild surfer prototype Matt Johnson, black surfers and an excerpt from William Finnegan's Pulitzer Prize winning Barbarian Days.
For those of us who struggle to finish autobiographies, the concise length of each tale makes it the perfect book to dip in and out of sporadically... whilst for the serious book worm it creates a complete picture of a lifetime spent surfing up and down the California coast and beyond. You can check out an excerpt over here at Huck Mag's website.
ABOUT JAMIE BRISICK
Jamie Brisick is undoubtedly one of the most eloquent and intelligent writers in surfing today. Having dropped out of the professional surfing circuit in the 90s, he ended up as editor of the now defunct Surfing Magazine. These days he writes regularly for The Surfer's Journal (available here) as well as non-sliding institutions like The New York Times and The Guardian. He is also the author of several books including Becoming Westerly and We Approach Our Martinis With Such High Expectations. His natural self-awareness and ability to draw objectively from experience has earned him accolades from fellow writers and journalists in the surf world and far beyond.
Reviews and praise for Dazzling Blue:
"...my list of golden era surf writers will always end with one of the most important. Jamie Brisick... Jamie is a writer’s writer and his new non-fiction collection Dazzling Blue is some of his finest work to date."
Chas Smith on Beach Grit (check the whole review here)
"It’s the romanticism of seemingly insignificant components of the surf experience that make Dazzling Blue incredibly thoughtful... Dazzling Blue, in essence, is an effort to capture the soul of surfing."
Dylan Heyden on The Inertia (check the whole review here)
