Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
Aug 2015 · Hachette UK
4.8star
28 reviewsreport
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464
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About this ebook
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and William Hill Sports Book of the Year: Barbarian Days is a deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer looking for transcendence 'that recalls early James Salter' (Geoff Dyer, Observer)
Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.
New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world's most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.
Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.
'Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard' Sports Illustrated
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography announced on 18/4/2016.
Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year announced on 24/11/2016
Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.
New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world's most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.
Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.
'Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard' Sports Illustrated
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography announced on 18/4/2016.
Winner of the William Hill Sports Book of the Year announced on 24/11/2016
Ratings and reviews
4.8
28 reviews
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March 3, 2018
William Finnegans description of cold water big surf in San Francisco and the waves of Madeira are such that one feels they are in the water and took me back to my experiences of my teens and early twenties. A beautifully written honest account of wave craving.
1 person found this review helpful
Scott Williams
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January 9, 2017
This life story had me enthralled with its ability to conjure pictures in my mind of a life lived in parallel to my own. Traveling to surf and forsaking all for the pursuit of an exotic uncrowded perfection. Great read!
J
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April 3, 2017
Brilliant . It is written my the staff reporter from new Yorker newspaper a life long surfer. Intelligent and stoked
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. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, he lives in Manhattan.
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