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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Penguin Press
August 2015
On Sale: July 21, 2015
464 pages
ISBN: 1594203474
EAN: 9781594203473
Kindle: B00G3L6JMS
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by
the acclaimed New Yorker
writer 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 entirely: 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 annealed in
challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of
life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even
while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. 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. He and a buddy, their knapsacks
crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They
discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji,
one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels
take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable
anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a
Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of
Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating
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. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is
undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he
chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and
obscure corners of Madagascar.
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