num_pages: 447
description: A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writerBarbarian Days is William Finnegans 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 nosesoff 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 whites-only 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 follyhe drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay on Mauiis 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 worlds greatest waves. As Finnegans 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 Finnegans surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.
language: English
title: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
publisher: Penguin Press