![]() ![]() In Honolulu, on the other side of the postcard perfect Diamond Head, as a “haole” in a school filled with local Hawaiians, Finnegan literally has to fight for his place in the surf and on the playground. ![]() ![]() Because of this fact, we are hooked in by a story of a skinny white kid from California transplanted to Hawaii, a tropical surfer’s paradise, where life is both glamourous and harsh. The author’s father lands the job of production manager for all those Hawaiian-based TV series that splashed across TV screens in the ’70s. This is a travelling surfer’s life story, told not through the prism of the desperate need to win heats in professional competition, but of a man wrestling with an activity that has him: “floating between two worlds, between society that had no rational content … there was a deep well of beauty and wonder in it … My enchantment would take me where it would”. Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. ![]() However, Finnegan has made a valiant attempt to argue our case. I suspect this is why William Finnegan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning surfing biography is called Barbarian Days. It’s in that moment when your partner catches you looking out the window at the toetoe plants for wind directions, and checking the tides at the most inconvenient times of the day. “Surfers are self-centered arseholes sometimes.” I’m sure the surf obsessed among us recognise this sentiment. ![]()
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