From his formative years of learning the social, physical, and emotional contracts of life in the water, beating against and riding along currents and waves, we follow Finnegan into his adulthood as he continues to surf, in San Francisco, Fiji, Australia, and even New York.įreeman was eager to point out how impressive it was that Finnegan was able to document his travels so extensively because of the journals he had written and kept. With host John Freeman, book club members gathered virtually last night to discuss Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, Barbarian Days, which charts the fervent passion for and obsession with surfing that dates to Finnegan’s youth in California and, later, Hawaii, where his father worked as a producer for television. And I don’t remember, but it’s so gruesome, and I don’t ever give him that credit, but there’s that little thing, which is that surfing is hard to learn.” “He sat there in his fisherman sweater smoking his pipe and said, go back and get three more. He said there was a day early on when I got sort of beaten up in Ventura and I was all cut and crying and wanted to come in, and he wouldn’t let me in the car,” William Finnegan said of his early surfing days at the 10th installment of Alta Journal’s California Book Club. My father took credit for me learning to surf.
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