Book review : Gregory J. Snyder : Skateboading LA : Inside professional street skateboarding

O'Connor reviews the book Skateboading LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding, written by Gregory J. Snyder. Academic tomes on skateboarding are few and far between. While there are plenty of books on skateboarding art, biographies of skateboarders, and more general texts on “lifestyle sports”—which are known for their risk, personal freedom, and anti-regulation—monographs exploring skateboarding are rare. All the more significant about this new release from Gregory J. Snyder, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York, is the fact that it engages with the core world of professional street skateboarding. This could seem like a niche issue, but as the author deftly explains, what happens in professional skateboarding is of direct consequence to the subculture—and sport—as a whole. More broadly, this book should be of interest to an increasingly wide audience of academic and general readers, as skateboarding confidently shakes off the shackles of its underground and criminal associations and prepares its debut in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.