![]() ![]() This was not the daydream of the happy idler. Early on he describes "the special brand of monomania, anti-social and ill-balanced, that a serious commitment to surfing nearly always brought with it… This was a track that led away from citizenship, in the ancient sense of the word, to a scratched-out frontier where we would live as latter-day barbarians. He admits that his addiction was a justifiable worry for his parents, and an obviously self-centered way of life. ![]() Finnegan's memoir won a Pulitzer Prize in 2016 for his reflections on his lifelong obsession with surfing. Fifty years later, and having traveled the world to find the perfect waves, he surfed in the winter sleet of Long Island. For his eleventh birthday his dad bought him his first surf board. William Finnegan rode his first wave when he was ten years old. To thine own self be true, urged Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet. William Finnegan, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (New York: Penguin, 2015), 447pp. ![]()
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