Capturing Kahanamoku - Michael Rossi

"An engaging romp." — New York Times Book Review"A haunting, quietly devastating excavation of a story we should all know but don’t: how a surfing legend became the target of eugenic obsession... Gorgeously written and brilliantly researched, this book is both a warning and a wonder." — Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Aviator and the ShowmanThe fascinating untold story of one scientist’s pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, written with the compelling drama and narrative insight of Why Fish Don’t Exist and The Lost City of Z. Deep in the archives of New York’s American Museum of Natural History sits a wardrobe filled with fifty plaster casts of human heads a century old. How they came to be is the story of one of the most consequential, and yet least-known, encounters in the history of science. In 1920, the museum’s director, Henry Fairfield Osborn, traveled to Hawaii on an anthropological research trip. While there, he took a surfing lesson with Duke Kahanamoku, the famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, the tall, muscular Kahanamoku embodied the “pure racial type” he was desperate to understand and, more significantly, preserve, in the human race. Upon his return to New York, Osborn’s fixation grew. He dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu to measure, photograph, and cast in plaster Kahanamoku and other Hawaiian people.
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