Overview
**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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780143109396
- ISBN-10: 0143109391
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- Publish Date: April 2016
- Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.45 x 1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.78 pounds
- Page Count: 464
Related Categories
Book Clubs: Catching waves
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan delivers an exhilarating account of surf culture while chronicling the ways in which the sport shaped him. As a boy in the 1960s, Finnegan moved with his family from California to Oahu, where he was an outsider among kids his own age. He took solace in surfing, finding a personal outlet in the pastime and quickly becoming addicted. In this beautifully written memoir, he recounts wave-chasing excursions to Polynesia, Thailand and South Africa during the 1970s—trips that ignited his social consciousness and his interest in journalism. Family, career and the departure of youth have failed to quell his passion for surfing, and in the book he addresses the challenges of practicing a young man’s sport at middle age. Finnegan shares colorful memories of beloved surf buddies and once-in-a-lifetime tubes, but his narrative is also an insightful meditation on the passage of time. This is an epic look at an elusive sport from one of the premier nonfiction writers working today.
BIG CHANGES
Plum Kettle, the 29-year-old heroine of Sarai Walker’s smart, sly novel, Dietland, weighs more than 300 pounds. Unhappy with her physical appearance, she monitors her meals and dreams of being thin. Plum writes an advice column for a teen publication and has hopes of becoming a serious writer. But her life takes a surreal turn after she meets the controversial Verena Baptist, whose family is behind the famous Baptist diet, and who encourages Plum to approach her weight in a new way. As she experiences a personal metamorphosis, Plum finds that she’s become entangled in a plot that may involve a group called Jennifer—a radical collective that targets misogynists. Through Plum’s personal evolution, Walker probes timely issues like sexuality and the pursuit of physical perfection, while also delivering a first-rate work of fiction. Funny, rebellious and ultimately compassionate, this is a refined debut from a writer who has much to share in the way of storytelling—and in wisdom about our image-saturated world.
TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is a sophisticated spy novel set at the close of the Vietnam War. The novel’s French-Vietnamese narrator, the captain, is an undercover Communist agent. Along with members of the South Vietnamese Army, who are unaware of his true sympathies, the captain escapes the turmoil of Saigon and settles in Los Angeles. There, he spies on his fellow countrymen, dispatching secret letters about their activities to a member of the Communist leadership. When the captain arouses suspicion, he must find a way to continue his mission without revealing his true identity. Meanwhile, he becomes involved in the making of a Hollywood film about Vietnam and falls in love. Nguyen juggles plot elements with remarkable ease, delivering a masterfully crafted debut that explores the legacy of war and the weight of loyalty.
This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Book Clubs: Catching waves
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan delivers an exhilarating account of surf culture while chronicling the ways in which the sport shaped him. As a boy in the 1960s, Finnegan moved with his family from California to Oahu, where he was an outsider among kids his own age. He took solace in surfing, finding a personal outlet in the pastime and quickly becoming addicted. In this beautifully written memoir, he recounts wave-chasing excursions to Polynesia, Thailand and South Africa during the 1970s—trips that ignited his social consciousness and his interest in journalism. Family, career and the departure of youth have failed to quell his passion for surfing, and in the book he addresses the challenges of practicing a young man’s sport at middle age. Finnegan shares colorful memories of beloved surf buddies and once-in-a-lifetime tubes, but his narrative is also an insightful meditation on the passage of time. This is an epic look at an elusive sport from one of the premier nonfiction writers working today.
BIG CHANGES
Plum Kettle, the 29-year-old heroine of Sarai Walker’s smart, sly novel, Dietland, weighs more than 300 pounds. Unhappy with her physical appearance, she monitors her meals and dreams of being thin. Plum writes an advice column for a teen publication and has hopes of becoming a serious writer. But her life takes a surreal turn after she meets the controversial Verena Baptist, whose family is behind the famous Baptist diet, and who encourages Plum to approach her weight in a new way. As she experiences a personal metamorphosis, Plum finds that she’s become entangled in a plot that may involve a group called Jennifer—a radical collective that targets misogynists. Through Plum’s personal evolution, Walker probes timely issues like sexuality and the pursuit of physical perfection, while also delivering a first-rate work of fiction. Funny, rebellious and ultimately compassionate, this is a refined debut from a writer who has much to share in the way of storytelling—and in wisdom about our image-saturated world.
TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer is a sophisticated spy novel set at the close of the Vietnam War. The novel’s French-Vietnamese narrator, the captain, is an undercover Communist agent. Along with members of the South Vietnamese Army, who are unaware of his true sympathies, the captain escapes the turmoil of Saigon and settles in Los Angeles. There, he spies on his fellow countrymen, dispatching secret letters about their activities to a member of the Communist leadership. When the captain arouses suspicion, he must find a way to continue his mission without revealing his true identity. Meanwhile, he becomes involved in the making of a Hollywood film about Vietnam and falls in love. Nguyen juggles plot elements with remarkable ease, delivering a masterfully crafted debut that explores the legacy of war and the weight of loyalty.
This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.