Finnegan does not answer the question of whether our surfing days will end before we do. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. The second downside is highly personal. At least his life is more exciting than most -- certainly more exciting (and accomplished) than mine. That is what good writing does, and it's too bad that we have to plow through so many books to find one like this. : examining the ways in which surfing intertwines with anthropology, economics, politics, and, of course, writing. 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. What a life! For surfers, the book is The Endless Summer writ smarter and larger, touching down at every iconic break.” —Los Angeles Magazine “Vivid and propulsive…Finnegan…has seen things from the tops of ocean peaks that would disturb most surfers’ dreams for weeks. He writes clearly and intelligently about the times -- the 60s ad 70s of growing up. He references my father's book, "Surfing Guide to Southern California," and for some reason even becomes a "Fitzpatrick" when living and surfing in Australia. Life is beautiful, joyful, and best shared with others.
The unusual title of this book might lead a prospective reader to think the author is going to talk about the dark side of the people who surf. . 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.
He spends most of his life (almost till the end of his 40s) searching for the perfect wave and … This is a masterful piece of writing.
Finnegan skilfully plaits together elements of his working, personal and surfing lives across oceans, continents and decades.
Meaning, I felt that 464 pages was a bit much. But really it was more matter of fact. It is excellent. move throughout the book. That is the elemental drive. Such is life for all of us, regardless of whether we surfed these waves or even lived this big of a life. Dezember 2019, Rezension aus Deutschland vom 12. A review gushed Finnegan as a "role model we all need."
Having grown up surfing on that stretch of coast, the winter swells at VFWs, Noriega, Sloat, and Fleishackers, is still considered something a surfer must work up to. ----- and his worry about the relationship is insight into his character. God, did I want to love this book. It captures the moments of joy and terror Finnegan’s lifelong passion has brought him, as well as his occasional ambivalence about the tenacious hold it has on him. 's he has no back story: he just is. Following this choppy bit is a love affair with Atlantic surf, especially a break on the Portuguese Island of Madeira, lost now to needless development -- "You shoulda been here yesterday!" Another review complained of the book's length and I, too, thought it could have been a shorter, beach break ride. Now having read the book, all of the questions that I was unable to broach with him years ago have been answered in full. Discuss William’s growth as a young man: –Political awareness –Relationship with women –writer/journalist –perception of his surfing buddies (Mark) he was very loyal to them more than his girlfriends –relationship with surfing. Did anyone back home even know what country we were in? defaultText: 'Menu', He has a cynical, liberal view of politics and religion but he is a reader. Unless he's selling me an autobiography.
Surfing defines everything about them whether they are riding the waves or walking down the street on their way to the grocery store to buy milk. The book was a bizarre mashup: cutesy children’s cartoons, hairy-armed war stories, nurse-and-doctor soap opera, graphic pornography. jQuery('#pagemenu').mobileMenu({
The author moved from California as a young teen and surfing became a key part of his life. In his new memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, Finnegan is explicit that “nearly all of what happens in the water is ineffable – language is no help.” And yet, what is a writer to do? I can recall across from Pier Avenue Elementary School was Greg Noll's..just down the street at Jacob's surfboard shops. Were I given unlimited space to review this book, I would simply reproduce it here, with a quotation mark at the beginning and another at the end. Yet, his tale is all good, starting with an easy drop as a teenager, living for a year off Diamond Head in Hawai'i, rambling through a flarblot sectiony bit -- I dunno, going to college, or having relationships, or something -- reaching a re-formed wave, a beautiful ride during his Endless Winter years in the South Pacific, bumbvorting bout, and even planting a first-wave discover's flag on Tavarua, Fiji (Finnegan does not claim to have been the first to surf it, just one of early ones). Reviewed in Australia on 16 December 2017. That said, if you are interested in the autobiography of a New Yorker writer whose greatest love has been surfing -- almost 500 pages worth -- you'll likely enjoy this journalist's tale. And by the end, I saw a lot of the author in myself. Besides the dedicated lifers, his colleagues were an eclectic bunch of jazz drummers, painters, beat poets, architects, wave riders, and other cultural loose ends. 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). 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. say awwww not really. A delightful storyteller, Finnegan takes readers on a journey from Hawaii to Australia, Fiji, and South Africa, where finding those waves is as challenging as riding them.” —Publishers Weekly's Best Summer Books of the Summer “A fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. Thank you, Mr Finnegan! Every break gets its own character and mood, patiently and delicately dissected; it makes the sport (for want of a better word) intelligible and interesting, and illuminates the spirituality of it too, without ever referencing it as such. Ten more things happen.
Barbarian Days is Finnegan's autobiography/memoir of his life as a surfer. It was also just a damn good read. 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. I haven't read other books on surfing and my expertise in limited to letting the saves knock me around on Cape Cod as a boy, and a love of the Beach Boys.
Reviews talk about how Finnegan explores themes like family. But, by the time he gets to early middle age in San Francisco, he is reaching the point where only bigger and bigger waves will give him the same high that he craves.
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. To find out his answer, I suppose I will have to wait for the sequel, "Octogenarian Days". Imagine what it's like to read about him surfing. The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Finnegan, William. Foolish me. Eloquent, evocative, nostalgic - this book threw me into one of those reveries about what might life might have been compared to what it has been. Despite that, I have found myself drawn to it's literature, perhaps because of a longing of things I wish I'd done, perhaps to quench my knack of ex-patness, perhaps as a midlife crisis. He is a formidable writer, and even if you've never been surfing this tale of searching for meaning in life will still grab your attention. Nonetheless, this was only for a few parts of the book and as a whole was vividly interesting. That this autobiography is called "a surfing life" is surely not accidental. More problematic, the tedium inexorably detracts from the magic in the man meets ocean leitmotif. One boy, thin and laughing and fourteen, told me that he had quit school because he was “lazy.” He had a Japanese comic book that got passed around the ferry roof. There may be enough "life" for those who don't relate to "surfing," for those of us sharing some of his experiences there is much to admire in what expresses. I read this over several months, with other books interspersed, and it was always easy to come back to and pick up the thread.
A man raised in Woodland Hills (I live in Calabasas), living a time in Hawaii and Lahaina (We have two places just outside Lahaina and spend months per year there - I'm writing this review from Maui), who went to school at UCSC (I grew up in Santa Cruz), writing about surfing and his time as a writer for the New Yorker, a magazine I've been reading, with my father, since I as a boy? Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.
Johnny Utah and that kind of stuff. jQuery('#nav').mobileMenu({
The world was mapped in so many different ways. But William Finnegan penned the rare exception to that rule, a New Yorker profile of his friend and surfing buddy, Mark "Doc" Renneker -- Playing Doc, Too much non-surfing memoir to satisfy those picking this up for the surfing. Finnegan offers an honest, unblemished portrait of the Ocean Beach experience without any need for embellishment.