Capturing Kahanamoku

“Michael Rossi’s Capturing Kahanamoku is 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. From the sunlit waves of Hawaii to the cold basements of American museums, Rossi reveals how race science wasn’t just pseudoscience—it was performance, delusion, and erasure, carried out in the name of progress. Gorgeously written and brilliantly researched, this book is both a warning and a wonder.” — Laurie Gwen Shapiro, author of The Aviator and the Showman”Capturing Kahanamoku is a riveting and timely exploration of how science, race, and power collided in the 20th century and how the echoes still reverberate today. With cinematic storytelling and meticulous research, Rossi shows how science can be manipulated to serve social ideologies and how those ideologies can, in turn, reshape science. Capturing Kahanamoku is not just a story about the past. It’s a reflection on who we are, how we see each other, and the urgent need to use science responsibly; as a tool for understanding, not oppression.” — Dr. Heather Berlin, neuroscientist, host of the PBS Nova series Your Brain, and co-host of StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson“Michael Rossi has penned one of the weirder and wilder rides in the weird and wild ride that is the history of surfing. Capturing Kahanamoku is a scientific detective story into the forgotten side of surfing, or a surfing detective story into the dark side of science. It’s a troubling legacy of obsession tucked inside a tropical legend of perfection—and a saga told by Rossi with grace, rigor and ten-toes-on-the-nose.” — Steven Kotler, New York Times bestselling author of The Art of Impossible and West of Jesus: Surfing, Science, and the Origins of Belief”A revelatory, immersive dive into the life of Duke Kahanamoku. This brilliantly rendered history compels us to reconsider our notions of physical beauty and national identity, and raises important questions about the perils of pseudoscience. Michael Rossi has cast a better likeness of the Duke than any sculptor could have dreamed.” — Dan Reiter, author of On a Rising Swell”[A] strange and captivating account… Rossi excels at exposing the bunk pseudoscience at the heart of eugenicists’ mystical fascination with race… readers will find this a fascinating look at the painful intersection of Hawaiian and sports history with an ignominious branch of science.” — Publishers Weekly

Michael Rossi is a historian of science and medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America. He has written for the London Review of Books, Nature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cabinet, among other publications. At the University of Chicago, Rossi is a member of the History Department, the Committee on Historical and Conceptual Studies of Science, and the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics. He lives in Chicago and New York.