Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of a life shaped by surfing. Finnegan, a staff writer at The New Yorker known for his reporting on war, politics, and poverty, reveals in this book that surfing has been the quiet organizing principle of his entire life, determining where he lived, who he befriended, and how he understood himself.
The early chapters cover his childhood in California and Hawaii, where he first encountered waves and became consumed by them. The descriptions of learning to surf in Hawaii, navigating racial tensions as a white kid in a predominantly local surfing community, and finding his first serious surf partner form the book’s coming-of-age section. Finnegan writes about the physical sensations of surfing with a precision that makes the experience vivid even if you’ve never stood on a board.
The middle chapters follow Finnegan and his friend Bryan Di Salvatore on a years-long trip through the South Pacific, Australia, and Asia, searching for perfect waves in places that had barely been surfed. These chapters are the book’s adventure core: remote reefs, dangerous currents, unfamiliar cultures, and the pure pursuit of waves that nobody else had ridden. The surf descriptions are extraordinary, both technically detailed and emotionally charged.
The later chapters cover Finnegan’s adult life: becoming a journalist, getting married, having children, and continuing to surf into middle age and beyond. The tension between his professional ambitions and his need for the ocean runs through these sections. Surfing is not a hobby for Finnegan; it’s an obsession that competes with everything else in his life, and he’s honest about the costs.
For founders, the book is about what it means to organize your life around an obsession, which is what starting a company requires. Finnegan captures the specific feeling of pursuing something that most people don’t understand or value, the loneliness of commitment to a craft, and the satisfaction of those rare moments when it all comes together. The writing itself is also a model: precise, honest, and free of the self-importance that often characterizes memoir.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography in 2016. The writing is beautiful and the pace, despite the book’s length, never drags. You don’t need to know anything about surfing to appreciate it, though you may want to learn after reading it.
