BARBARIAN DAYS

Summary

A deeply-rendered self-portrait of a life-long surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker journalist

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, of a complex enchantment. Surfing looks like a sport, but that’s only to outsiders. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, 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, 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—and dramatizes the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

About the Author

WILLIAM FINNEGAN is the author of four books. His debut, Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid, was named by the New York Times Book Review a top ten nonfiction title of 1986. Since then, he has written Dateline Soweto: Travels With Black South African Reporters, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1999; A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Perspectives on Southern Africa); and Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, which was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best nonfiction titles of the year and by the Los Angeles Times as the best nonfiction title of 1998. Finnegan has twice been a National Magazine Award finalist and has won numerous other journalism awards for his field reporting in the US and abroad. A regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1984, he was hired as a staff writer in 1987.

Product Details

• Black & white photographs throughout
• Paperback : 464 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs