**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.
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