Book Review: The Story of Modern Skiing

The Story of Modern Skiing - John Fry*

Now, I'm gonna go ahead and break with my longstanding tradition of only reviewing books that score on the lemon scale, which is to say: books that are actually worth reading and publicly pan a book. Why? B/C this is sort of the demographic that might buy the thing and when your well meaning aunt gives it to you you'll be prepared.

:rolleyes:

W/O going into terrible awful detail: the book is wildly uneven containing some genuinely interesting info and a LOT of pointless minutia and ramblings while either plain leaving out completely or treating only superficially important aspects of skiing often peppered with unintentional humor such as the sentence opening the chapter on "Extremities"

"Extreme skiers were once people who, having set out to go from point A to point B on skis, amplified the adventure by accidentally falling down an escarpment during a whiteout or getting caught in a snow slide."

or the opening to "Snowboarding"

"Snowboarding's appeal is in the rhapsodic sensation of banking against the turn's centrifugal force, like floating in gravitationless space."

hooo doggie, is it getting thick in here or what? Oh and telemark skiing is covered in 1/2 page :nonono2: His narrative kind of loses its punch much past ~1980 and while the book contains info all the way into 2005 it is obvious he's already tuned skiing out and the info is presented almost as an afterthought. Anyone who skied through the 80s, 90s 2000's won't recognize their sport except in brief flashes.

I think in the end this is the history of SKI as in the magazine that Mr. Fry edited for many years (and when covering the magazines he spends ~1pg on Powder and many pages on SKI, SKIING, SNOW COUNTRY....with no mention of Backcountry, Couloir, Freeze etc...), if you really like that mag you may dig this one.

Zero Lemons

*My copy was an uncorrected proof.