Review
WL Rating
All Those Summers is one of those books that is tough to classify. It’s part surfing photo anthology, part history, a smattering of biography and some homegrown poetry and prose thrown in for good measure. As a result, it may leave some readers feeling a bit unbalanced. The author, Michael McPherson, is a surfer from the 60’s who has combined a rich collection of photos from Hawaii’s golden age of surfing. There are some excellent shots of a young Gerry Lopez, Butch Van Artsdalen, Fred Hemmings, BK and the list goes on. The layout of book (and I almost never comment on design) seems amateurish, as if it were done via Apple’s “build a photo album” feature. You can imagine some great photos just being placed on the page without much apparent thought. The straight-up prose of McPherson’s memories is reasonably engaging and entertaining. The poetry, on the other hand, is something else entirely. Connoisseurs of fine poetry will, not surprisingly, be unimpressed by McPherson’s personal poetic recollections. But, in my opinion, you wouldn’t buy this book for the poetry. You’d get it for the great photographs. Unfortunately for many folks, however, that just might not be enough. (February 2010).
All Those Summers - Michael McPherson
