This is Leah Erdmann with the Sioux City Public Library, and you’re listening to Check It Out.
Today, I’m recommending Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s compiled reflections back over his unconventional past chasing waves and adventures all over the world. Armchair travelers and landlocked dreamers are in for a scenic and thrilling ride as Finnegan recounts everything from his earliest beachside memories through to his career as a prolific author, New Yorker journalist, and war reporter. Through it all, he remained endlessly motivated by his deep reverence and spiritual connection to the ocean and his passion for the art of surfing, which he called “a refuge,” “happy hiding place,” and “hostile wilderness,” all in one.
The memoir chronicles Finnegan’s early childhood beginning after his family moved from California to Hawaii, where the social upheaval of the 1960s was evident even in the microculture of the small public school he attended. As he makes friends (and enemies) among local gangs and groups of surfers and navigates the precarious social structure of the time, he also studies the patterns of the ocean and learns its habits off the shores of his new home. He grows from a bookish and surfing-obsessed young boy into an adventurous young man, and begins traveling alongside friends and girlfriends in pursuit of the world’s most notorious waves– in more than one instance nearly losing his life in exchange for another thrill.
If, like me, you’re a native Iowan whose familiarity with surf culture has been derived from movies like North Shore and Point Break, you might be just as fascinated as I was by Finnegan’s lifestyle and range of experiences vastly different from those we’re accustomed to.
Escape the Midwest and explore the world’s beaches in Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life at the Sioux City Public Library!
Support for Check It Out on Siouxland Public Media comes from Verde Outdoor Media.