The Drop: How the Most Addictive Sport Can Help Us Understand Addiction and Recovery

Surfer Ziolkowski (On a Wave) , associate director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, succumbs to a fondness for academic jargon in this perceptive yet tedious look into the relationship between the highs of both surfing and narcotics. To support his suggestion that surfing “is a kind of parable of addiction,” Ziolkowski dives into the history of drugs in surf culture beginning in the 1960s when beach towns were flooded with psychedelics, cocaine, and opium. He writes that, like addiction, the ocean offers an escape that’s hard to quit: “If there are waves unridden within reach, like lines of drugs undone, it nags and tugs at one.” While his account of his past cocaine addiction offers an intimate take on the subject, frequent Latinisms (“the puer/puella aeternus”) distract from his otherwise vivid writing and evocative insights about the dopamine rush that the sport and drugs share. And though he succeeds at evoking sympathy for champion surfers who’ve struggled with addiction, the emotional impact is diluted by the prevalence of sentences such as “There is a semiotic dimension to addiction, an interplay between cognition and emotion that is activated by the signifier cocaine.” Ripe as the topic is for attention, this misses the mark by prizing stiff erudition over feeling. (July)