Two days ago, the alt-right website published a review of BBD that hits on immigration, overpopulation and surfers’ barely concealed fascism. Soon, Grajagan in 1979, Africa and, later, among the big-wave surfers of Ocean Beach, San Francisco, and, then, spending long vacations on Madeira, waiting for Jardim Do Mar’s heavy deep-water right to break. I’d only penetrated three chapters into the book when we suddenly camping on Maui waiting for Honolua Bay to break and, shortly after, camping on the empty beach at Tavarua for a week and surfing a new discovery called Restaurants. A delicate New York gentleman, a flabby enthusiast. I imagined a writer with a loosely knotted bow-tie and a drooping moustache.

I’d dived into Finnegan’s work in the New Yorker before, including an excerpt from the book about his time as a kid in Hawaii (read here) and figured the memoir would be gently entertaining but not especially adventurous. It threw me under the bus of a two-day obsessive read. The LA Times said, “It’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.” The Wall Street Journal called it “gorgeously written and intensely felt… dare I say that we all need Mr Finnegan… as a role model for a life, thrillingly, lived.” It also includes ten thousand dollars in prize money to each category winner. The Pulitzer Prize, of course, is America’s most prestigious award in journalism. Three years ago, it won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. The prize committee praised it as, “A finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career.” Pulitzer Prize-winning surf memoir reveals surfers as anti-egalitarian, territorialist, and exclusionary.ĭo you remember the surf memoir called Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by the New Yorker’s Bill Finnegan?

Barbarian surf book