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A carregar... Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (original 2015; edição 2015)por William Finnegan (Autor)
Informação Sobre a ObraBarbarian Days: A Surfing Life por William Finnegan (2015)
   Ainda não há conversas na Discussão sobre este livro.  MylesKesten | Jan 23, 2024 |    ) breic | Feb 8, 2023 |  ) toby.neal | Dec 29, 2022 | The author has been obsessed with surfing since he was an adolescent in the 1960s. This book is a memoir of his surfing adventures and their impact on his life. He travels to many parts of the world, including Indonesia, Oceania, Australia, South Africa, and Portugal. He surfs where he lives in the US – Hawaii, California, and New York. This book is well-written and provides lots of local color for countries around the world. The author features several of his fellow surfers and eccentric characters. There is a vast amount of information contained in this book of the many factors that impact the decision to go out into the elements, such as currents, wind direction, wave types, and reefs. It gets extremely detailed in places. He explains surfing techniques, boards to use in differing conditions, and the surfing culture. His obsession seems to be partly based on the endless search for the perfect wave and partly on the exhilaration of living life at the edge of danger. It is a book of journeys around the world and journeys in life. It is a story of “man against the sea” and knowing how far to push one’s own capabilities. His descriptions of surfing fiascos are riveting. He almost drowned several times. In these sections, I found myself holding my breath to find out if he would make it, even though he obviously survived to write this book. This is not a book about surfing competitions. Nor is it about finding the largest waves. It is about how an obsession with surfing that accompanied the author in each of six decades of his life. Pick this one up if you enjoy stories about extreme sports or adventuring. ( ) Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 | After college and a job working on a railroad he traveled in search of surf. The South Pacific, Asia, Africa. He worked on a novel and wrote the occasional story for publication. A stint as a teacher in South Africa elevated his social conscience and led him to journalism covering war and injustice. After he returns to the U.S. and begins a writing career in earnest, Finnegan still surfs. New York, Madeira, more California and Hawaii – anywhere he can actually. He describes his study of the waves, weather and water in various spots. The book is a travelogue of sorts as Finnegan documents life and people of the places he has lived and surfed. Some of the best descriptions are of the surfers he’s come to know throughout the world. The section of Madeira, a place he returned to frequently, is particularly evocative. Finnegan’s passion has resulted in an extremely satisfying book. (  ) Hagelstein | Jun 29, 2022 | sem críticas | adicionar uma crítica
PrémiosDistinctionsNotable Lists
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. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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The crashing of waves on his ears. The birds. The boats. The banter of surfing friends.
The taste of the salt-water and the icy arctic winds off Montauk on Long Island.
With Finnegan we journey to the world’s premier surfing waters. Honolulu. Fiji. Madeira. Australia. Guam. And on.
Of course, it is winter and I am in slushy Toronto. Not so cold today. Snow lined streets hush the din of traffic.
The traffic inside Finnegan’s memoir is the dialogue with the rocks, the sandy-bottomed bays, the furious energy of the sea. And the speed of gliding down a 20-foot swale in the ocean.
There is day and to my surprise there is night riding. It sounds pretty dangerous.
And to what end?
Finnegan never comes out and says what exactly he loves about surfing. Is it the speed? Is it the thrill of danger? Does he love the sea? It frees him from having to compete in the schoolyard. We never find out exactly what it’s all about for him.
He sure doesn’t want to be a nine-to-fiver.
At one point in his adolescence he admits that the thrill of meeting beach girls was a driving force. Somehow he confuses his devotion for surfing with his girlfriends’ devotion to him. He’s a little surprised when women leave him but not that much.
He eschews calling surfing a sport and hates the popularization of surfing when it impinges on his freedom or safety or the sense of exclusivity. (