Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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

â€œReading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.â€â€”Sports Illustrated

Included in President Obamaâ€™s 2016 Summer Reading ListÂ
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Barbarian DaysÂ is William Finneganâ€™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.Â
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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.Â Barbarian DaysÂ takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our nosesâ€”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.
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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 follyâ€”he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Mauiâ€”is served up with rueful humor. As Finneganâ€™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.
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Barbarian DaysÂ 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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Praise forÂ Barbarian Days:
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â€œWithout a doubt, the finest surf book Iâ€™ve ever read . . . But on a more fundamental level,Â Barbarian DaysÂ offers a clear-eyed vision of American boyhood. Like Jon Krakauerâ€™sÂ Into the Wild, it is a sympathetic examination of what happens when literary ideas of freedom and purity take hold of a young mind and fling his body out into the far reaches of the world.â€â€”The New York Times Magazine
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â€œIncandescent . . . Iâ€™d sooner press this book upon on a nonsurfer, in part because nothing Iâ€™ve read so accurately describes the feeling of being stoked or the despair of being held under. . . . [But] itâ€™s also about a writerâ€™s life and, even more generally, a questerâ€™s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any Iâ€™ve read in a long time.â€â€”Los Angeles Times
Country USA
Manufacturer Penguin Books
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-07-21
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Penguin Books
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-07-21
Format	Kindle eBook

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

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