The Impossible: Rodney Mullen, Ryan Sheckler, and the Fantastic History of Skateboarding
"GQresearcher Cole Louison gave himself an impossible assignment: to write the complete history of a sport without it reading like a dusty encyclopedia or self-promotional wiki page. And make it interesting to an audience of people who don't really care about that sport (while not losing the millions of potential readers who do). Plus explain what an 'ollie' is.... [H]e's accomplished just that." —GQ"Louison is both booster and critic, and writes with an eye to contradictions—skateboarding is a loner sport with a strong community, an outlaw pastime with big-money corporate backing—and gets to the heart of an often misunderstood pursuit." —The New Yorker"Louison . . . has a light reportorial touch, a sense of the absurd and a sincere, affable persona…. [He] has turned his attention to the skateboarding world—a milieu that suffers no shortage of absurd, and absurdly talented, characters…. Through Louison’s eyes we see a once small subculture, now thoroughly colonized by mainstream media, public relations personnel, and other non-skate actors…. That Louison is able to successfully convey the excitement of skateboarding to the layman without offending the connoisseur is a testament to his well-researched grasp of a sometimes opaque subject."—McSweeney's Internet Tendency