Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Finnegan, William
Summary in 3 Sentences or Less
Finnegan takes you back to a time when surfing wasn’t a lifestyle brand. It was dirtbag travel, no plan, no promise, just waves and the people crazy enough to chase them. No internet, no guidebooks, no phones, just rumors of waves and long shots.
Review
Beautiful book on surfing, adventure, and traveling the world full-time. I read it before my long journey to Brazil and South America. Even though he spent most of his time in the other part of the world (from Hawaii to Fiji to Bali to South Africa), it was amazing to read and see what that kind of travel was like back then. No internet, lack of English, just raw discovery.
Highlights
“What are they doing this for? It’s just pure. You’re alone. That wave is so much bigger and stronger than you. You’re always outnumbered. They always can crush you. And yet you’re going to accept that and turn it into a little, brief, meaningless art form.”
THREE: THE SHOCK OF THE NEW
Chasing waves in a dedicated way was both profoundly egocentric and selfless, dynamic and ascetic, radical in its rejection of the values of duty and conventional achievement.
SEVEN: CHOOSING ETHIOPIA
I had been speaking a different language—more cutting, ironic, masculine, permanently on guard against sounding silly—for a long time. I was fluent in that dialect, which had its lecherous crudities.
EIGHT: AGAINST DERELICTION
rending my winter night’s sleep with a screaming phone. I even let him preside over primordial moments, his Mephistophelian cackle providing a lifeline from the yawning space of my fear in big waves to some rock face where the psychic crampons held.
TEN: THE MOUNTAINS FALL INTO THE HEART OF THE SEA
You also need to have work that can be done at night, a tolerant family, a state-of-the-art hooded wetsuit, and, in my experience, the Internet. Without online buoy data, real-time wind readings, precise wind and swell forecasts, and“surf cams,” it would be impossible for me, at least, to know where to go when.
He’s an old-fashioned craftsman—he works hard to make things look easy.
the ingenuity of desperate efforts to maintain dignity in the face of humiliation.“I identify,” he explains. Toward the end of the trip, I came down with an apparent