Barbarian Days

Resumen del libro

"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"

Biografía del autor

William Finnegan (Nueva York, 1952) es escritor y periodista. Staff writer de la revista The New Yorker desde 1987, ha escrito sobre temas tan diversos como el apartheid, la guerra de los Balcanes, política latinoamericana, la pobreza en EE. UU. o el surf. Sus artículos y reportajes han recibido diversos premios y distinciones. Es autor de cinco libros: Crossing the Line (1986), Dateline Soweto (1988), A Complicated War (1992), Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country (1998) y Años salvajes (2015, galardonado con el Premio Pulitzer de biografía 2016).