Barbarian days : a surfing life / William Finnegan.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**

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.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 Off Diamond Head Honolulu, 1966-67 (p. 1)
• 2 Smell the Ocean California, ca. 1956-65 (p. 59)
• 3 The Shock of the New California, 1968 (p. 85)
• 4 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky Maui, 1971 (p. 105)
• 5 The Search The South Pacific, 1978 (p. 147)
• 6 The Lucky Country Australia, 1978-79 (p. 209)
• 7 Choosing Ethiopia Asia, Africa, 1979-81 (p. 237)
• 8 Against Dereliction San Francisco, 1983-86 (p. 277)
• 9 Basso Profundo Madeira, 1994-2003 (p. 351)
• 10 The Mountains Fall into the Heart of the Sea New York City, 2002-15 (p. 409)

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

From Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © William Finnegan, 2015.   At the post office in Nuku'alofa, I tried to send my father a telegram. It was 1978, his fiftieth birthday. But I couldn't tell if the message actually went through. Did anyone back home even know what country we were in? I wandered down a road of half-built cinderblock houses. There was a strange, philosophical graffito: ALL OUTER PROGRESS PRODUCE CRIMINAL. I passed a graveyard. In the cemeteries in Tonga, late in the day, there always seemed to be old women tending the graves of their parents--combing the coral-sand mounds into the proper coffin-top shape, sweeping away leaves, hand washing faded wreaths of plastic flowers, rearranging the haunting patterns of tropical peppercorns, orange and green on bleached white sand. A shiver of secondhand sorrow ran through me. And an ache of something else. It wasn't exactly homesickness. It felt like I had sailed off the edge of the known world. That part was actually fine with me. The world was mapped in so many different ways. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers. But the truth was, we were wandering now through a world that would never be part of any correspondent's beat. It was full of news, but all of it was oblique, mysterious, important only if you listened and watched and felt its weight. On the ferry here, I had ridden on the roof with three boys who said they planned to see every kung-fu and cowboy and cop movie playing at the three cinemas in Nuku'alofa until their money ran out. One boy, thin and laughing and fourteen, told me that he had quit school because he was "lazy." He had a Japanese comic book that got passed around the ferry roof. The book was a bizarre mashup: cutesy children's cartoons, hairy-armed war stories, nurse-and-doctor soap opera, graphic pornography. A ferry crewman frowned when he got to the porn, tore each page out, crumpled it, and threw it in the sea. The boys laughed. Finally, with a great bark of disgust, the sailor threw the whole book in the water, and the boys laughed harder. I watched the tattered pages float away in a glassy lagoon. I closed my eyes. I felt the weight of unmapped worlds, unborn language. I knew I was chasing something more than waves. So the sadness of the obscure graveyard, of unforgotten elders buried under sand made my chest tight. It seemed to mock this whole vague childish enterprise. Still, something beckoned. Maybe it was Fiji. Excerpted from Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Abandoning religion while a youngster in California and Hawaii, author Finnegan (a New Yorker staff writer) became an obsessive surfer. This memoir takes us around the world's beaches as he pursues what a compatriot describes as not a sport, but a path. Readers who do not share Finnegan's preoccupation may need a little assistance along the way. Maps would have been helpful to those unfamiliar with the geography of Hawaii or Australia, not to mention Fiji or Tonga or Madeira, in all of which the author spends considerable time (as he also does, unexpectedly, in San Francisco and, more improbably yet, New York). Helpful, too, would have been diagrams of waves and boards, and a great deal more explanation (or a glossary) of the terminology and intricate skills to which Finnegan refers with frustrating offhandedness. Absent an insider's knowledge, much of the presumed drama or beauty inherent in these accounts is regrettably lessened, at least for nonsurfers. Other aspects of his life are addressed only superficially: women, friendships, finances, even the books he loves. There exists a kind of cult readership for surfer lit including novels (Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source, 1984) and memoirs (Chas Smith's Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell,2013) and it is in that albeit small world that this book will find an audience.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.