Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker known for reporting on war, race, and labor, but Barbarian Days is the private book he waited decades to write. It follows him from a childhood in Southern California and Hawaii through years of travel with a surfboard through Samoa, Fiji, Indonesia, South Africa, and Australia. The memoir treats surfing seriously, as a lifelong apprenticeship to specific breaks, ocean moods, and the friendships built around chasing them. It also traces his parallel life as a writer and eventually a husband and father in New York, and the difficulty of holding those lives together. Barbarian Days won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2016. Sahil Bloom has recommended it as one of the best memoirs on obsession and mastery.
What you might want to know about Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
New Yorker writer William Finnegan tells the story of a life spent chasing waves across the world and what surfing taught him about attention and obsession.
Bloom has recommended Barbarian Days in his newsletter and social feeds as one of his favorite books on obsession and lifelong mastery. He has pointed to Finnegan's discipline in returning to the water for decades as a model for any long term craft.
No. Finnegan writes for a general reader and explains the mechanics of waves as he goes, and most non surfers report that the book is really about attention, travel, and friendship.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life was written by William Finnegan, published in 2015 by Penguin Books.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is 464 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life takes most readers 7 to 10 hours to finish.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
