Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing
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'Huntford has also undertaken the monumental task of tracing and explaining the development of the sport of skiing outside Scandinavia, particularly in Alpine Europe. As such, he has provided us with a much richer and more complex picture than was previously available from Arnold Lunn's highly partial "The Story of Skiing.'"--,
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Predating the wheel, the ski has played an important role in our history. This is brilliantly brought to life in this engaging book. Roland Huntford's brilliant history begins 20,000 years ago in the last ice age on the icy tundra of an unformed earth. Man is a traveling animal, and on these icy slopes skiing began as a means of survival.That it has developed into the leisure and sporting pursuit of choice by so much of the globe bears testament to its elemental appeal. In polar exploration, it has changed the course of history. Elsewhere, in war and peace, it has done so too. The origins of skiing are bound up with the emergence of modern man and the world we live in today.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A review in The Guardian seems to eloquently put some of the concerns expressed here and which I found myself:
"Two Planks and a Passion - surprisingly, considering its title - is a dispassionate, almost academic book; born, by his own admission, out of Roland Huntford's previous biographies of the Norwegian explorers Nansen and Amundsen. The author was Scandinavian correspondent for the Observer and the translations are his own; he is even married to a Swede. But, whether or not through this fondness for things Nordic, the presentation is unmistakably partisan. From the first chapter, on prehistoric skiing, we are told that: "Although the Vis fragments and the Zalavruga drawings come from what is now Russia, they do not lie in the historic Slav homelands. They are in one of the corridors of migration along which northern Norway, Sweden and Finland were supposedly first settled. They therefore properly belong to the ancient past of Fennoscandia." This is frankly disingenuous: the white Scandinavian peoples slowly spread north from what is now Denmark and are just as racially and linguistically distinct from the indigenous makers of those skis as the Slavs.
A small point perhaps, but the book continues to downplay the contributions to skiing made by all other races. Pains are taken to suggest that the Nordic countries did not copy skiing from the neighbouring Lapps, for example, but then even more tenuous arguments are employed to deny that same originality of thought to the distant Slovenians and Swiss. Prehistoric cave drawings of skiing in China are cited, then dismissed rather than explored. We read that: "Ignoring the Ainu of Hokkaido, skiing had been introduced [to Japan] by resident Norwegians about 1902." But why ignore the Ainu - why aren't they of interest? And the whole of Alpine skiing - the form practised by virtually all British skiers - is described as "unspeakably crude when compared with Nordic skiing". A chapter headed "The First Winter Olympics" is actually devoted to a summer games, held in Sweden; the frankly petulant and protectionist-sounding Nordic opposition to the winter games; and then how the Scandinavian athletes fared. The reader is left barely wiser about the event itself.
Even the tiny British influence on skiing is unnecessarily downplayed and disparaged as "British intrigue". "It was at Murren that Arnold Lunn lorded over his little clubby fiefdom, developing his slalom"; the same slalom "born out of chauvinistic machination". A single sentence is dedicated to the fact that Britain had the second oldest national ski body, preceded only by Russia; then we are told no more of either, while the first 19 chapters, as well as much of the remainder of the book, dwell in the most ponderously minute detail on the emergence of the sport and its governance in Scandinavia.
Despite this, Two Planks and a Passion is certainly the most in-depth study of skiing currently in the English language and it will no doubt remain the defining record for some time. Huntford makes many important points about the history of skiing, from hunting and raiding tool, through early days as an extremely egalitarian pastime and then the industrialised era, when skiers for the first time lost their title as the fastest humans on Earth. The contribution made to that long history by the Scandinavian countries, Norway in particular, can scarcely be exaggerated. Which is why it is so curious that the author does precisely that."
Copied from The Guardian, Saturday 22 November 2008
"Two Planks and a Passion - surprisingly, considering its title - is a dispassionate, almost academic book; born, by his own admission, out of Roland Huntford's previous biographies of the Norwegian explorers Nansen and Amundsen. The author was Scandinavian correspondent for the Observer and the translations are his own; he is even married to a Swede. But, whether or not through this fondness for things Nordic, the presentation is unmistakably partisan. From the first chapter, on prehistoric skiing, we are told that: "Although the Vis fragments and the Zalavruga drawings come from what is now Russia, they do not lie in the historic Slav homelands. They are in one of the corridors of migration along which northern Norway, Sweden and Finland were supposedly first settled. They therefore properly belong to the ancient past of Fennoscandia." This is frankly disingenuous: the white Scandinavian peoples slowly spread north from what is now Denmark and are just as racially and linguistically distinct from the indigenous makers of those skis as the Slavs.
A small point perhaps, but the book continues to downplay the contributions to skiing made by all other races. Pains are taken to suggest that the Nordic countries did not copy skiing from the neighbouring Lapps, for example, but then even more tenuous arguments are employed to deny that same originality of thought to the distant Slovenians and Swiss. Prehistoric cave drawings of skiing in China are cited, then dismissed rather than explored. We read that: "Ignoring the Ainu of Hokkaido, skiing had been introduced [to Japan] by resident Norwegians about 1902." But why ignore the Ainu - why aren't they of interest? And the whole of Alpine skiing - the form practised by virtually all British skiers - is described as "unspeakably crude when compared with Nordic skiing". A chapter headed "The First Winter Olympics" is actually devoted to a summer games, held in Sweden; the frankly petulant and protectionist-sounding Nordic opposition to the winter games; and then how the Scandinavian athletes fared. The reader is left barely wiser about the event itself.
Even the tiny British influence on skiing is unnecessarily downplayed and disparaged as "British intrigue". "It was at Murren that Arnold Lunn lorded over his little clubby fiefdom, developing his slalom"; the same slalom "born out of chauvinistic machination". A single sentence is dedicated to the fact that Britain had the second oldest national ski body, preceded only by Russia; then we are told no more of either, while the first 19 chapters, as well as much of the remainder of the book, dwell in the most ponderously minute detail on the emergence of the sport and its governance in Scandinavia.
Despite this, Two Planks and a Passion is certainly the most in-depth study of skiing currently in the English language and it will no doubt remain the defining record for some time. Huntford makes many important points about the history of skiing, from hunting and raiding tool, through early days as an extremely egalitarian pastime and then the industrialised era, when skiers for the first time lost their title as the fastest humans on Earth. The contribution made to that long history by the Scandinavian countries, Norway in particular, can scarcely be exaggerated. Which is why it is so curious that the author does precisely that."
Copied from The Guardian, Saturday 22 November 2008
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This work is more than impressive in its scope. It deals with the history of skiing from a social, military, political as well as pure sporting perspective. Its thoroughly researched facts naming people and places with authority give it great texture. The drama that unfolds in the (failed) Russian invasion of Finland in 1939 is worth the price of admission alone.
The early influence of the British in Alpine competition skiing will surprise some.
Great Read
The early influence of the British in Alpine competition skiing will surprise some.
Great Read
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
In response to Dr M. Law's review, can I just say that the history of skiing IS by default the history of nordic skiing. As the ancestor of skiing per se, it came into existence long, long before Alpine skiing, a derivative that was developed at the end of the 19th century, whereas nordic skiing has been around since prehistoric times. All the later forms of skiing, including Alpine skiing, ski skating, ski jumping etc are relatively modern modifications of the orginal. But thanks for the review - I am now assured it is a proper history of skiing. I am definitely going to order it!
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