But on a more fundamental level, Barbarian Days offers a clear-eyed vision of American boyhood. Praise for Barbarian Days: “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read. Barbarian Days is anold-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of thegradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.
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 nearlysuccumbing to malaria. Youthful folly-he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui-is served up withrueful humor. He details the intricacies offamous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school inHonolulu. It immerses the reader in the edgycamaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Barbarian Days takes us deep intounfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses-off the coasts of New York and San Francisco.
A bookish boy, and then anexcessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. He haschased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demandingcourse of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat ofa surfboard.”-Sports Illustrated Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoirof an obsession, a complex enchantment. **Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** “Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway onbullfighting William Burroughs on controlled substances Updike on adultery.
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