Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

**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.


Author: William Finnegan
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 07/21/2015
Pages: 464
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.60h x 6.50w x 1.60d
ISBN: 9781594203473


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 02/15/2015 pg. 68
Publishers Weekly 04/27/2015
Library Journal 05/15/2015 pg. 88
Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2015
Entertainment Weekly 05/15/2015 pg. 65
Entertainment Weekly 05/29/2015 pg. 85
Outside 07/01/2015 pg. 29
New York Times Book Review 07/19/2015 pg. 8
Entertainment Weekly 07/24/2015 pg. 62
New York Times Book Review 07/26/2015 pg. 22
New York Review of Books 08/13/2015 pg. 30
Shelf Awareness 08/18/2015
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/02/2015 pg. 25
Entertainment Weekly 12/04/2015 pg. 46
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/06/2015 pg. 27
Books & Culture 01/01/2016 pg. 34
Library Journal 02/15/2015

About the Author
WILLIAM FINNEGAN is the author of Cold New World, A Complicated War, Dateline Soweto, and Crossing the Line. He has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous journalism awards, including two Overseas Press Club awards since 2009. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.