Surfing has taken him places he'd never otherwise have thought to go, but it also buoyed him through a career reporting on the politics of intense scarcity, limitless cruelty, and unimaginable suffering. I bought this for my dad (a keen surfer) and he was instantly enthralled! Try again. Conditions apply. Prime members enjoy fast & free shipping, unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Video and many more exclusive benefits. Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 1, 2017. I would heartily recommend this book to anyone, whether they are a surfer or not. Interspersed among the big waves are thoughtful, often aphoristic reflections, and digressions on much wider themes, which never seem forced or shoe-horned in. I'm not a surfer, but it didn't diminish my enjoyment in the least. It's a wonderful tour of a life's obsession. But also because while it is a book about ‘A Surfing Life’…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 “Gorgeously written and intensely felt…With Mr. Finnegan’s bravura memoir, the surfing bookshelf is dramatically enriched. Glad I read it Glad I'm done. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the worlds greatest waves. And He sucks you in again and again I couldn't stop coming back. ...to enjoy this book. 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. The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World, Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, BAD KARMA: The True Story of a Mexico Trip from Hell, How to Live the Dream: Things Every Van Lifer Needs to Know. While the boomer coming-of-age tale of the turbulent sixties and seventies is perhaps a cliché at this point, this book is certainly not. This was on Obama's reading list, so i thought i'd give it a go. There was a strange, philosophical graffito: ALL OUTER PROGRESS PRODUCE CRIMINAL. Wild Waves. Thank you, Mr Finnegan! A Pulitzer? And it’s even better than one could have imagined…This is Finnegan’s gift. 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 “Which is precisely what makes the propulsive precision of Finnegan’s writing so surprising and revelatory… Finnegan’s treatment of surfing never feels like performance. Finnegan is a sober, straightforward author, but the level of detail, emotion, and insight he achieves is unparalleled…A must-read for all surfers — not just because of its unblinking prose and subtle wit, but because it’s the only book that properly details what it’s like to cultivate both an award-winning career and a dedicated surfing life.” —Eastern Surf Magazine “Finnegan describes, with shimmering detail, his adventures riding waves on five continents. Still, Finnegan considerately shows himself paying the price of admission in a few near drownings, and these are among the most electrifying moments in the book…There are too many breathtaking, original things in Barbarian Days to do more than mention here—observations about surfing that have simply never been made before, or certainly never so well.” —The New York Times Book Review “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read… All this technical mastery and precise description goes hand in hand with an unabashed, infectious earnestness. Once he finished with it he gave it to a family friend (not a surfer) who loved it equally as much. In a sense, Barbarian Days functions as a 450-page thank you letter, masterfully crafted, to his parents, friends, wife, enemies, ex-girlfriends, townsfolk, daughter—everyone who tolerated and even encouraged his lifelong obsession. A great read. 3, The Reign of Emperor Gallienus: The Apogee of Roman Cavalry, Pasta Grannies: The Secrets of Italy's Best Home Cooks (pasta book, pasta making, pasta recipe book), Barbarians Apply the Axe Directly to the Problem.. .repeat as needed: Notepad Notebook Composition Dungeons Dragon D&D DND Pathfinder 3.5 Tarrasque | ... Tiefling Star God Dice Abadar | Geek Cup Gift, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages that interest you. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. And the descriptions of surfing are amazing. The Emptiness of Our Hands: 47 Days on the Streets, The Culture Question: How to Create a Workplace Where People Like to Work, Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea, The Journey of Crazy Horse: A Lakota History. There's a problem loading this menu at the moment. Wonderful read! I watched the tattered pages float away in a glassy lagoon. Just an absolute treasure. Really? (Best Diving Spots in The Net... Reef Smart Guides Florida: Palm Beach: Scuba Dive. We use cookies and similar tools to enhance your shopping experience, to provide our services, understand how customers use our services so we can make improvements, and display ads. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. Finnegan captures the way that surfing changes ones life decisions without getting dragged into mystic gobbledygook. He breaks the newbie reader in gently, and as a non-surfer unfamiliar with much of the argot, i never lost track of what was going on during his vivid accounts of his adventures as he chases waves across the globe. Approved third parties also use these tools in connection with our display of ads. Something went wrong. The book was, to me, not only the story of a man's like, but also a love letter to the amateur pursuit of a pastime (hobby? A ferry crewman frowned when he got to the porn, tore each page out, crumpled it, and threw it in the sea. His story is fascinating and is written in a choppy, conversational style which makes the paragraphs fly by. Hello, Sign in. The language is appropriate, articulate and the prose is balanced ( apart from one really bizarre typo where it seems a completely different sentence has been superimposed on another). While surfers have a reputation for being inarticulate, there is actually a fair amount of overlap between what makes a good surfer and a good writer. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. E-mail after purchase. Finally, with a great bark of disgust, the sailor threw the whole book in the water, and the boys laughed harder. Amazon.co.uk: barbarian days. The writing is uniformly excellent, and the book is very deserving of it's Pulitzer win. Wonderful read! But there's enough vicarious enjoyment, excitement and insight, beautifully expressed and sensitively communicated, to bridge the gaps in direct experience and bring this thoughtful autobiography to life for any reader with imagination. A surfing book? Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman--Including 10 More Years of Business Unusual, Grey Skies, Green Waves: A Surfer's Journey Around the UK and Ireland. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness. . A lyrical and intense memoir.” —Kirkus “An up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author’s journey as a lifelong surfer. It’s a way to help them—and us—understand what drives him to keep paddling out half a century after first picking up a board.” —NPR.org “[A] lyrical, intellectual memoir. The boys laughed. Snorkel. The world was mapped in so many different ways. “How many ways can you describe a wave? Copyright © William Finnegan, 2015. That pairing makes Barbarian Days exceptional in the notoriously foamy genre of surf lit: a hefty, heavyweight tour de force, overbrimming with sublime lyrical passages that Finnegan drops as effortlessly as he executed his signature ‘drop-knee cutback’ in the breaks off Waikiki…Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery…Finnegan is a virtuoso wordsmith, but the juice propelling this memoir is wrung from the quest that shaped him…A piscine, picaresque coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.” —Sports Illustrated Overflowing with vivid descriptions of waves caught and waves missed, of disappointments and ecstasies and gargantuan curling tubes that encircle riders like cathedrals of pure stained glass…These paragraphs, with their mix of personal remembrance and subcultural taxonomies, tend to be as elegant and pellucid as the breakers they immortalize…This memoir is one you can ride all the way to shore.” —Entertainment Weekly “[A] sweeping, glorious memoir…Oh, the rides, they are 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. Finnegan’s world is as dazzling and deep as any ocean. He makes surfing seem as foreign and simultaneously as intimate a sport as possible…Surfing is the backbone of the book, but Finnegan’s relationships to people, not waves, form its flesh…[A] deep blue story of one man’s lifelong enchantment.” —Boston Globe “Finnegan’s epic adventure, beautifully told, is much more than the story of a boy and his wave, even if surfing serves as the thumping heartbeat of his life.” —Dallas Morning News “That’s always Finnegan’s M.O. I closed my eyes. This book is extremely well written and is sure to please surfers and non-surfers alike, as technical vocabulary is explained perfectly in laymans terms without detracting from the purpose of the book. What a life! Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 25, 2018. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. Youthful follyhe drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Mauiis served up with rueful humor. Get 90 days FREE of Amazon Music Unlimited. I don't surf and likely never will but I used to ski a lot of powder and he captures those enthusiasms perfectly. Along the way, you get to meet Finnegan's friends, family and colleagues, but they are always, in several senses, secondary to the lure of the ocean. Surf. For worldly Americans, the whole globe was covered by the foreign bureaus of the better newspapers. What a life! Find all the books, read about the author and more. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. Really? Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 8 March 2018. The author touches on love, on responsibility, on politics, individuality and morality, as well as on the lesser-known aspects of surfing: the toll it takes on the body, the weird lingo, the whacky community. No Kindle device required. Previous page of related Sponsored Products, Penguin Books; Illustrated edition (April 26 2016), I really enjoyed this biography of life slightly outside the mainstream. Snorkel. But he does an amazing job telling his story. Without a single wasted flourish, this is prose that, paragraph by paragraph, reminds you of the gob-smacking, heart-rending, soul-lifting, potential of language. Who knew there was so much to be said about surfing? And it is cause for throwing your wet-suit hoods in the air…If the book has a flaw, it lies in the envy helplessly induced in the armchair surf-traveler by so many lusty affairs with waves that are the supermodels of the surf world. Surf. It's a book about travel and growing up, and the power of a pastime when it becomes an obsession.” —Men's Journal “With a compelling storyline and masterful prose, Finnegan’s beautiful memoir is sure to resonate.” —The New York Observer “Fearless and full of grace.” —Outside Magazine “Irresistible.” —O, The Oprah Magazine “It’s always fabulous when an incredible writer happens to also have a memoir-worthy life; Barbarian Days bodes well.” —GQ.com “A demonstration of gratitude and mastery.