This is a book about a love of waves, and the various waves he has ridden. This is not a book about anything beyond the coastal surface in which ocean energy explodes onto the rocks and sand and coral. The ocean is deep, vast, terrifying, unknowable, filled with secrets and creatures and death. Finnegan says this is a book about the ocean, ‘about that myth-encrusted place” (432), but I disagree. This is a book about a man who loves surfing. The books travels to every significant shortboarding break you can imagine, and Finnegan offers an incredibly detailed and intimate catalogue of the coastlines, beaches, waves, currents, water and light at these breaks. A memoir of his days in the waves, Finnegan’s book traces his life surfing from (and this is a non-exhaustive list) Hawai’i to California, island-hopping across the Pacific, to Australia and South Africa, and through parts of Europe and his current home, in New York. And so, surf writing is a genre with legs – quite an achievement, I think we can all agree.įinnegan’s book, ‘Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life’, can easily be placed in this category. Memoir is a favourite genre of mine, so books about people's surfing lives always make it onto my radar. And I too, not fitting easily into either of these categories, love reading about past days of surfing. Thousands of surfers - like them, who knew them, or who admired them – love reading these stories to reflect on their own surfing lives and histories, while the current affinity for the apparent “golden era of surfing” among younger surfers, who seem to think the past was crowd free and idyllic, have a similar hunger. As men who started surfing in the 50s, 60s and 70s head into their sunset years, the scramble to claim their place in the surfing past appears to have come upon them suddenly and absolutely.

Books about surfing's past are a growing genre of non-fiction.

A Pulitzer! For a book about surfing! Or perhaps it was the claim (I can’t remember where), that this book would change the surf writing genre. Perhaps the singularly glowing reviews in the New York Review of Book, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal following his awarding of a Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography. It sat, unread, by my beside for months, and I was never sure what my hesitation was. I have come late to Finnegan’s celebrated book, ‘Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life’.

Barbarian days a surfing life review