Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10735 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-29
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 436 pages

About the Author
Roland Huntford is the world's foremost authority on the polar expeditions and their protagonists. The biographer of Shackleton and Nansen, his other books include Scott and Amudsen: The Last Place on Earth and The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Journey.

Customer Reviews

Two Planks and 'Even more Bias'
'The Dramatic History of Skiing' Eh?

This is a veiled attempt at a continued 'Scott' bashing, and hailing 'Ammundsen' again!!!

The history bits about the actuall skiing are excellent, but this man hates 'Captain Scott' so much, and the attitude being himself as 'Norwegian' as the Norwegians themselves, is repeatative & tiresome.

The (ahem) hidden agenda is so obvious as be totally transparent to anyone who knows this hateful man's work. Tedious and romantic to anyone who doesn't!

One star, only because zero stars is not an option.

Social History, War, Sport, and Drama
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

Review from The Guardian
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