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Book Cover
Book
Author Finnegan, William, author

Title Barbarian days : a surfing life / William Finnegan

Copies

LOCATION CALL NO. STATUS
 Bangor Pub. Lib. Stacks  797.32 .F497b    AVAILABLE  
 UM Orono Stacks  GV838.F57 A3 2015    AVAILABLE  
 UMM Stacks  GV838.F58 A3 2015    AVAILABLE  
 Bangor Pub. Lib. Stacks  797.32 .F497b c.2  AVAILABLE  
Phys Descr 447 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Series McNaughton lease books. TxDN
Contents Off Diamond Head (Honolulu, 1966-67) -- Smell the ocean (California, circa 1956-65) -- The shock of the new (California, 1968) -- 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky (Maui, 1971) -- The search (The South Pacific, 1978) -- The lucky country (Australia, 1978-79) -- Choosing Ethiopia (Asia, Africa, 1979-81) -- Against dereliction (San Francisco, 1983-86) -- Basso profundo (Madeira, 1994-2003) -- The mountains fall into the heart of the sea (New York City, 2002-15)
Summary Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses -- off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a native Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly -- he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui -- is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world's greatest waves. As Finnegan's travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs
Note Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography, 2016
Subject Finnegan, William
Surfers -- United States -- Biography
OCLC # 861479073
ISBN # 9781594203473
1594203474