The book Sharks Death Surfers by Melissa McCarthy explores the philosophical aspects of surfing, using it as a metaphor for life and death. The reviewer found the book intense and invigorating, requiring an open mind to appreciate its interconnected ideas.
Sharks Death Surfers by Melissa McCarthy is a unique exploration of surfing as a metaphor for life and death. The book is based on a misdirection about Captain Cook's final journal entry, which the author uses to delve into the philosophical aspects of surfing. The reviewer found the book intense and invigorating, requiring an open mind to appreciate its interconnected ideas. The book doesn't provide clear answers but instead asks thought-provoking questions, making it a challenging but rewarding read. The reviewer particularly appreciated the way the author draws together seemingly unrelated concepts to create a complex web of ideas.
Quick quotes
The sport of surfing is often dismissed as trivial, but according to Melissa McCarthy it is “the very best place to be looking if we want to find out anything that matters
Rather than plodding along in a predictable, linear fashion towards a carefully argued conclusion, McCarthy’s book dots around between lots of apparently tenuously linked concepts and slowly draws them all together (sometimes neatly, sometimes messily) into a huge, interconnected web.
This isn’t really the kind of book that answers questions, but the kind that asks them, and to try and summarise the myriad different directions it takes would be to do it a disservice.