About this item
A cultural history of sneakers, tracing the footprint of one of our most iconic fashions across sports, business, pop culture, and American identityWhen the athletic shoe graduated from the beaches and croquet courts of the wealthy elite to streetwear ubiquity, its journey through the heart of American life was just getting started. In this rollicking narrative, Nicholas K. Smith carries us through the long twentieth century as sneakers became the totem of subcultures from California skateboarders to New York rappers, the cause of gang violence and riots, the heart of a global economic controversy, the lynchpin in a quest to turn big sports into big business, and the muse of high fashion. Studded with larger-than-life mavericks and unexpected visionaries--from genius rubber inventor, Charles Goodyear, to road-warrior huckster Chuck Taylor, to the feuding brothers who founded Adidas and Puma, to the track coach who changed the sport by pouring rubber in his wife's waffle iron---Kicks introduces us to the sneaker's surprisingly influential, enduring, and evolving legacy.
About the Author
Nicholas K. Smith is the author of "Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers." His work has appeared in Esquire, GlobalPost, the Vienna Review and in the Tucson Weekly, among others. He has worked at The Earth Institute at Columbia University as a research assistant for the science news site GlacierHub.org.He has won numerous journalism awards including the first place in the community reporting category from the Arizona Press Club and contributed to the Tucson Weekly's first place award for best blog initiative from the Suburban Newspaper Association. Nicholas is also a 2014 Lynton Book Writing Fellow from Columbia University. He currently lives in Vienna, Austria and is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School with a masters of science degree in journalism. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Arizona.
