HUCK Magazine

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program, and you should keep in mind that I may not be the intended audience for this book, being neither a skateboarder, surfer, or snowboarder: creative artists whose comments and advice feature prominently in the book. In fact, I admit that I don't understand how riding a board qualifies as creative art, and so I'm confused about the presence of these people among more acknowledged creatives like Ai Weiwei, Miranda July, and (my hero) Werner Herzog. I will say that their words fit in well with the words of the others. Everybody in this book gets a sentence or two, and that's it. Some of them are thought-provoking ("You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things." — Slavoj Žižek) but many of them are trite ("Everything takes time — the only way to get things done is to do it. It can be overwhelming, but the key is to set goals and take it one day at a time." — Bob Burnquist). You can flip through, see the interesting photographs, and read all the quotes in less than an hour.

The problem with advice is that what worked for one person may not work for another. Too many of these quotes seem to be about the particular experience of the speaker. ("Music changed my life. It gave me a new vocabulary to negotiate my feelings." — Nas; "There's no limit to what you can do on a skateboard. It's freedom. It's independence. It's acceleration." — Tony Alva) This is a beautiful book—the photographs are fine, and the feel of the cover and pages is delicious — but it's a slight one. It gets three stars from me, not two, because it doesn't really pretend to be more than what it is: a small book of little sayings by the heros of the founder of Huck magazine.… (meer)