Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan

£9.99

Fleur:

‘I might have mentioned already that I’m pretty fascinated by surfing (despite being terrible at it!), but  even if you have no interest at all in surfing, this book is a fascinating journey through some major events in recent history as William Finnegan travels around the world, working, living, looking for waves. He writes with a conversational charm that makes pages skip by. I can’t recommend this book highly enough!’

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ISBN: 9781472151414 Category: Tags: , , ,

Description

Winner of the Pulitzer Price and William Hill Sports Book of the Year: Barbarian Days is a deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer looking for transcendence ‘that recalls early James Salter’ (Geoff Dyer, Observer)

Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.

New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world’s most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.

Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man’s gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.

‘Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard’ Sports Illustrated

Additional information

Weight 488 g
Dimensions 217 × 139 × 37 mm
Attribute Value 1

Paperback