A staff writer at The New Yorker, he leads a counterlife as an obsessive surfer, traveling around the world, throwing his vulnerable, merely human body into line after line of waves in search of transient moments of grace.It's an occupation that has never before been described with this tenderness and deftness.'- TIME Magazine, Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2015 'How many ways can you describe a wave? You'll never get tired of watching Finnegan do it. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.īarbarian 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. 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.

Youthful folly-he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui-is served up with rueful humor. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.įinnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses-off the coasts of New York and San Francisco.

A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. ' -The New York Times Magazineīarbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. 'Without a doubt, the finest surf book I've ever read.

Included in President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List Description **Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**

Barbarian days a surfing life