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.
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Creators
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Awards
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Release date
July 21, 2015 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780698163744
- File size: 7965 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780698163744
- File size: 7983 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from April 27, 2015
In this panoramic and fascinating memoir, long-time New Yorker staff writer Finnegan pays tribute to the ancient art of surfing. Arriving on Oahu from California at 13, in the mid-1960s, Finnegan discovered that Hawaiian public school students weren’t particularly welcoming to haoles; surfing brought him acceptance and contentment, and would remain central to his life for the next half century. In the late 1970s, he set out in pursuit of a perfect wave, and spent five years circumnavigating the globe with long stops in Polynesia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa. The social inequality he witnessed led him to journalism, but after his return to the U.S. and fatherhood, the waves still beckoned, even if that meant enduring a January swell off Long Island. Throughout this lengthy work, Finnegan never loses sight of the marginalized, such as the black students he taught in apartheid South Africa. Yet the core of the book is a surfing chronicle, and Finnegan possesses impeccable short-board bona fides. As a middle-aged, professionally successful man, he grapples with his aging body and the contradictions of surfing’s commodification, at one point returning as a high-end tourist to a wave he pioneered as a penniless kid. Surfing (mostly) remains a man’s world, and Finnegan’s attempts to mention the women he loved seem like afterthoughts. Nevertheless, he has written a revealing and magisterial account of a beautiful addiction. -
Kirkus
May 15, 2015
An award-winning staff writer for the New Yorker offers a probing account of his lifetime passion for surfing. Though Finnegan (Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, 1998, etc.) was not "a beach kid," family friends showed him how to enjoy riding the waves of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Eventually, surfing became an interest he pursued with growing avidity as his parents moved between Southern California and Hawaii. Between detailed accounts of his encounters with the waves of San Onofre and Honolua Bay, Finnegan interweaves stories of growing up a bookish boy among Hawaiian natives who hated him for being haole (white) yet also finding friendship among fellow outsiders who saw beyond race and bonded over surfing. A "sunburnt pagan," Finnegan was gradually initiated into the deeper mysteries of the ocean that created the waves he rode with such dedicated absorption. He became like the early Hawaiian pioneers of surfing: not exactly "barbaric" (as these practitioners were considered by Christian missionaries) but still part of a group "typecast as truants and vagrants." In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the author pushed the limits of freedom by experimenting with sex and drugs and dropping in and out of college. Yet surfing remained a constant throughout the chaos of his youth. In his mid-20s, he began an epic quest for the ultimate wave that took him to Guam, Samoa, Fiji, Australia, Java, and, eventually, Africa. Finnegan's journals of his experiences form the backbone of his minutely detailed rendering of days spent sizing up swells and riding to glory. As brilliant and lucid as some of these descriptions are, they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the narrative, which includes, among many others, stories about the life-changing experiences in apartheid South Africa that turned him away from fiction and toward a career as a prominent journalist. The book nevertheless provides a fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. A lyrical and intense memoir.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Library Journal
May 15, 2015
Finnegan (staff writer, The New Yorker; Cold New World) recounts his experiences as a surfer, beginning with his teen years surfing in Hawaii, covering his globe-trotting search for the perfect wave, and concluding with his current lifestyle fitting waves in between work and family. Traveling to Samoa, Fiji, South Africa, and Madeira among other places, Finnegan chronicles the obsession that drives surfers like himself to take on the dangers of sharks, wipeouts, and near drowning all in pursuit of the heightened experience that surfing provides. The constants flowing through this part coming-of-age story and part travelog are the ocean and the waves that the author tries to better understand. The result is an up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author's journey as a lifelong surfer. Finnegan's writing is polished and bold, but the lengthy descriptions of individual waves and their personalities may be daunting to the average reader. VERDICT This high-caliber memoir will best appeal to audiences with an interest in surfing. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/15.]--Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Library Journal
February 15, 2015
A New Yorker staff writer for over 25 years and the winner of two recent Overseas Press Club awards, Finnegan departs somewhat with a personal story of his youth, chasing waves from the South Pacific to Africa. It isn't just a lark. Finnegan relates joining a whites-only gang in a tough Honolulu school, though his closest friend was Hawaiian, and along the way, he smartly observes the diverse societies he visited. With a national tour.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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