William Finnegan

Barbarian Days: a Surfing Life William Finnegan

Publisher Marketing:"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 entirely: 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 annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. 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. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world s greatest waves. As Finnegan s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating 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. Today, Finnegan s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar." Review Citations: Library Journal Prepub Alert 02/15/2015 pg. 68 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Publishers Weekly 04/27/2015 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) - *Starred Review Library Journal 05/15/2015 pg. 88 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Kirkus Reviews 05/15/2015 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Entertainment Weekly 05/15/2015 pg. 65 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Entertainment Weekly 05/29/2015 pg. 85 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Outside 07/01/2015 pg. 29 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 07/19/2015 pg. 8 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Entertainment Weekly 07/24/2015 pg. 62 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) New York Times Book Review 07/26/2015 pg. 22 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) New York Review of Books 08/13/2015 pg. 30 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Shelf Awareness 08/18/2015 (EAN 9781594203473, Hardcover) Contributor Bio:  Finnegan, William 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. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, Finnegan lives in Manhattan.