**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography** 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 Included in President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List
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.
Praise for Barbarian Days: Without a doubt the finest surf book I've ever read . . . But on a
more fundamental level Barbarian Days offers a clear-eyed vision of American boyhood. Like Jon
Krakauer's Into the Wild it is a sympathetic examination of what happens when literary ideas
of freedom and purity take hold of a young mind and fling his body out into the far reaches of
the world.-The New York Times Magazine Incandescent . . . I'd sooner press this book upon on a
nonsurfer in part because nothing I've read so accurately describes the feeling of being
stoked or the despair of being held under. . . . [But] it's also about a writer's life and
even more generally a quester's life more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any
I've read in a long time.-Los Angeles Times
