PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...a fascinating, thoughtful and occasionally riveting book ... She approaches these confrontations not in a spirit of moral reckoning, but as an ethnographer trying to understand the social logic of surveillance under socialism.
Aaron James
MixedThe New York Times Book Review...Surfing With Sartre, aims to articulate the distinctive philosophical value of the surfer way of being ...some chapters are more compelling than others ...presents adaptive attunement as a fruitful way to understand how much of the world works, as well as a winning strategy for life ... The rhetorical conceit of James’s book is a debate between him and Sartre. This is not wholly successful as a framing device, in part because many of the discussions have little to do with Sartre ...By showing how a few simple principles for wave sharing can give rise, through a process of adaptive attunement, to the fair and egalitarian allocation of a limited resource, he offers surfing as a model for global cooperation in an age of ecological scarcity ...not surprising his chapters on 'society' and 'work' are particularly strong. Surfers may want to flip straight to his argument for the necessity of a 'more leisurely, surfer-friendly style of capitalism.'
