Exploring the Best Surf in "Barbarian Days" - A 2016 Summer Adventure

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**

Featured on President Obama's 2016 Summer Reading List is "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life," recognized as one of the best surf books of 2016.

'Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life' was hailed as the best surf guide of 2016 by The New York Times, showcasing a captivating tale of the best surf spots. The New York Times described it as 'indubitably the best surf guide I’ve ever read.' Dive into the world of surfing with this mesmerizing account from 2016 summer.

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a fancy enchantment. Browsing solely appears to be like like a sport. To initiates, it’s one thing else: a fantastic dependancy, a demanding course of examine, a morally harmful pastime, a lifestyle.

Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan began browsing as a toddler. He has chased waves everywhere in the world, wandering for years by the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, after which an excessively adventurous younger man, he went on to turn into a distinguished author and struggle reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, a few of them proper beneath our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader within the edgy camaraderie of shut male friendships solid in difficult waves.

Finnegan shares tales of life in a whites-only gang in a tricky college in Honolulu. He exhibits us a world turned the wrong way up for teenagers and adults alike by the social upheavals of the Sixties. He the intricacies of well-known waves and his personal apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD whereas using large 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 Individuals and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market whereas almost succumbing to malaria. All through, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity.

Barbarian Days is an old-school journey story, an mental autobiography, a social historical past, a literary street film, and a unprecedented exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood artwork.

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