Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

By William Finnegan

Book Overview

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**

Included in President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List

"Without a doubt, the finest surf book I've ever read . . . " --The New York Times Magazine

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses--off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.

Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly--he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui--is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan's travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143109391
• ISBN13: 9780143109396
• Release Date: April 2016
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

infinite surf

The promise of Barbarian days from the onset was in the mindset and language of the infinite surfer. Wave description, conditions trump it all and the romp was as vivid as it was endless. I wondered where the author got his funds as the locales were notoriously expensive. Granted life on the beach, sleeping at large was pretty affordable, but airfare was not. I often wondered about that. Barring that minute detail, the book is written for those of us who have a taste of the wave and want to read his passion. I loved it from first to last page, and could not put it down, but then again, I was crazy enough to survive a swim at Sandy's in Oahu, though I never took a wave as I feared a week in the hospital with a busted arm or leg. The passages about the actual locales are memorable and Finnegan is a very gifted writer. Those descriptive elements are fresh without being repetitive, and mind you, we are talking surfing here. So well done! The pacing was a wee bit irregular, time passed swiftly in some places and lagged in the last part in Sunset. But the topic of the wave and the descriptions saved the day. I'd recommend it for anyone who has that love affair with salt water, or those body surfers who love a challenge, or best yet, those who have seen Nazare or Tahiti, I'd read it again, just for the waves alone.

Fantastic

Worth every penny - read, and reread worthy!