Escucha y lee

Descubre un mundo infinito de historias

  • Lee y escucha todo lo que quieras
  • Más de 500 000 títulos
  • Títulos exclusivos + Storytel Originals
  • 14 días de prueba gratis, luego $24,900 COP/al mes
  • Cancela cuando quieras
Descarga la app
CO -Device Banner Block 894x1036

Capturing Kahanamoku: How a Surfing Legend and a Scientific Obsession Redefined Race and Culture

Idioma
Inglés
Format
Categoría

Biografía

The 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 and faces that are 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. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically “perfect,” yet belonging to an “imperfect” 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. The study touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity.

In Capturing Kahanamoku, historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating cultural history that is an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science, a warning of the pernicious and lasting impact of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification.

A heady blend of Barbarian Days and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Capturing Kahanamoku is a Victorian saga that explores very modern questions about humanity, the noble pursuit of knowledge, and dark compulsions to design nature.

Capturing Kahanamoku includes 16-20 black-and-white photos throughout.

© 2025 HarperAudio (Audiolibro ): 9780063280007

Fecha de lanzamiento

Audiolibro : 21 de octubre de 2025

Valoraciones y reseñas

Reseñas de un vistazo

¡No hay reseñas todavía!

Descarga la app para unirte a la conversación y agregar reseñas.