“Barbarian Days” by William Finnegan – Around the World on a Surfing Board

For the casual observer from the outside, surfing seems like a cool and somewhat simple sport, one that doesn't evolve into anything more than a hobby.

However, for people like William Finnegan, surfing represents a whole lot more than that: it is a way of life, one that can take a person around the entire world and can also be seen as a an international community with a high sense of camaraderie.

In his autobiography Barbarian Days, the international journalist William Finnegan discusses his surfing life from his earlier days in Honolulu to the globetrotting journey he embarked which ended up turning him into an anthropologist more than anything else.

In these writings we get glimpses into what surfing meant for William and his friends at the time, what it means to become part of the surfing community, and all the details and intricacies associate with it that we couldn't see or think of from the outside.

However, Barbarian Days is a lot more than just a book about a man who went surfing around the world. It becomes rather clear from the start that Finnegan's ambitions are considerably grander than that as he delves into the racial tensions that were prevalent in his school days, how he was in a “whites only” gang while his best friend was Hawaiian.

He describes how the upheavals of the 1960s changed the world for both kids and adults. When he goes abroad, he does a lot more than describe the shape and size of the waves. Rather, he narrates the whole thing like a real adventure, paying a lot of attention to the lives of the locals he comes across.

At a certain point, this book which, I guess, started out as a recollection of surfing adventures, becomes a window into the lives of people we would have never given a thought about otherwise. We learn about foreign customs and rural ways of living, with Finnegan sometimes even going in unsolicited detail about all the mechanisms in a small, rural fishing village.

Mimicking the author himself, the book is written with a lot of joyous and optimistic energy, and even when the heavier themes are explored there is still a certain lightness to it, ensuring the reader doesn't get bogged down in the more depressing aspects of life.

Finnegan's experiences are actually quite entertaining to read seeing as how for the most part they are presented like a story, and it's that of a restless young man who had to learn the world from first-hand experience.

In conclusion, Barbarian Days is definitely the kind of book surfing fans are going to love for it explains that world in great depth and really does justice to its magnificence and the sense of peace and belonging it brings to the lives of those who belong to it.

And even if you aren't into surfing in the slightest, you'll learn a lot about the interesting customs, functions and values of societies far away and removed from our own.

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William Finnegan William Finnegan is a staff writer from The New Yorker and is also an acclaimed international journalist with a few works of writing under his name, mainly addressing the issues of racism in Southern Africa and politics in South America. In addition, he is also known for writing a number of interesting books on his passion: surfing.