BOOK MARK
Biography packs power, warmth of Duke
By Wanda Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
"Duke, A Great Hawaiian" by Sandra Kimberley Hall; Bess Press, hardback, $10.95
Though packaged as a gift book, this small, well-designed volume adequately summarizes Duke Kahanamoku's considerable impact — the amazing athletic ability that allowed him to continue to compete at the Olympic level into his 40s, his role in reviving the Hawaiian art of surfing not just here but worldwide and his unique position as the Islands' official Ambassador of Aloha. It's clear, in reading his friends' comments about him and his own words as culled from interviews, that
Kahanamoku's legend is not overblown; this was a man of great humility and dignity, high principles and true aloha.
Asked late in life to offer tips for young surfers, he characteristically focused not on technique but on attitude and the problem, even then, of surf rage: "Just take your time — wave comes. Let the other guys go; catch another one." In its calm wisdom, "Wave comes" seems an aphorism every bit as worthy of a bumper sticker as "Eddie Would Go."
The pictures that occupy every left-facing page in the book are the kind that you linger over and study — from Duke knitting for the soldiers during World War II to the last photo of him surfing at age 64.
Hall, co-author of a previous full-scale biography of Kahanamoku, and designer Carol Colbath, have given us — and Duke — a beautiful gift.
