They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world's greatest waves. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. Youthful folly - he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui - is served up with rueful humor. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a native Hawaiian surfer. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses - off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a writer and war reporter. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa.
Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life.
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