Low Price Guarantee
We Take School POs
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Contributor(s): Finnegan, William (Author)

View larger image

ISBN: 0143109391     ISBN-13: 9780143109396
Publisher: Penguin Books
Retail: $19.00OUR PRICE: $13.87  
  Buy 25 or more:OUR PRICE: $12.73   Save More!
  Buy 100 or more:OUR PRICE: $12.16   Save More!


  WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD!   Click here for our low price guarantee

Binding Type: Paperback - See All Available Formats & Editions
Published: April 2016
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Sports & Recreation | Surfing
- Travel | Special Interest - Adventure
Dewey: B
Physical Information: 1" H x 5.45" W x 8.5" L (0.78 lbs) 464 pages
Features: Illustrated, Price on Product
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
**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.

 
Customer ReviewsSubmit your own review
 
To tell a friend about this book, you must Sign In First!