Barbarian Days - A Surfing Life

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

Product details

• Authors: William Finnegan, Finnegan William
• Publisher: Corsair
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.06.2016
• EAN: 9781472151414
• ISBN: 978-1-4721-5141-4
• No. of pages: 512
• Dimensions: 130 mm x 195 mm x 34 mm
• Subjects: Guides > Sport > Water sport, sailing; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies; Memoirs, Surfing, windsurfing, water skiing, SPORTS & RECREATION / Water Sports / Surfing, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs