Capturing Kahanamoku

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The fascinating untold story of one scientists pursuit of a legendary surfer in his quest to define human nature, for readers of Why Fish Dont Exist and Lost City of Z.

Deep in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York sits a wardrobe of headssome fifty plaster casts of human faces a century old. How they came to be is the story of one of the most consequential, and yet least-known, encounters in the history of science.

In 1919, the museums then-director Henry Fairfield Osborn traveled to Hawaii for a surfing lesson. His teacher was Duke Kahanamoku, a famous surf-rider and budding movie star. For Osborn, a fervent eugenicist, Kahanamoku was a maddening paradox: physically perfect, and yet belonging to a notionally imperfect race.

Upon his return to New York, Osborns fixation grew. He dispatched young scientist Louis Sullivan to Honolulu with an odd taskto measure, photograph, and cast in plaster the Hawaiian people, Kahanamoku in particular. This outlandish assignment touched off a series of events that forever changed how we think about race, culture, science, and the essence of humanity.

In Capturing Kahanamoku, historian Michael Rossi draws on archival research and firsthand interviews to weave together a truly fascinating narrativeat once an absorbing account of obsession, a cautionary tale about the subjectivity of science and the afterlives of eugenics, a meditation on humanity, and the story of a man whose personhood shunned classification.