To the Extreme

Insider and outsider narratives on the essence of modern extreme sports.An international array of authors, including some prominent extreme athletes like Jake Burton and Arlo Eisenberg, look at a variety of issues and concerns within the new action extreme sports that are gaining popularity throughout the world. For each sport, an interpretation is presented through two essays: one written by a scholar active in some aspect of research for the given activity, and another by a practitioner/athlete who writes from the inside out. The juxtaposed essays confront questions about the essence of sport such as, What is sport?; How does it originate?; and What is its use, value, and function? This book offers a fascinating look at how twentieth- and twenty-first-century sport forms emerge, proliferate, and take hold in a sport-crazy world.Robert E. Rinehart teaches Kinesiology at California State University at San Bernardino. He is the author of Players All: Performances in Contemporary Sport. Synthia Sydnor is Associate Professor of Kinesiology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.