Barbarian Days A Surfing Life
By: William Finnegan
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....Read More
Experience: Expand My Horizons, Take in Someone's Story
Format: Paperback
Genre(s): Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction
Page(s): 464
Published: 2016
Rental Price: $6.99 for six weeks (List Price $18.00 | Save 61%)
- DESCRIPTION
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- EDITORIAL REVIEWS
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 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.
WILLIAM FINNEGAN is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.
"How many ways can you describe a wave? You'll never get tired of watching Finnegan do it. 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
"A hefty masterpiece." - Geoff Dyer, The Guardian
"Terrific...Elegantly written and structured, it's a riveting adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, and a restless, searching meditation on love, friendship and family...A writer of rare subtlety and observational gifts, Finnegan explores every aspect of the sport -- its mechanics and intoxicating thrills, its culture and arcane tribal codes -- in a way that should resonate with surfers and non-surfers alike. His descriptions of some of the world's most powerful and unforgiving waves are hauntingly beautiful...Finnegan displays an honesty that is evident throughout the book, parts of which have a searing, unvarnished intensity that reminded me of 'Stop Time, ' the classic coming-of-age memoir by Frank Conroy." - Washington Post
