William Finnegan

A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whitesonly gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

A Surfing Life

Barbarian Days

Meg Wolitzer

Jonathan Lethem

Dave Eggers

Neil Gaiman

Anthony Doerr

Salman Rushdie

Lauren Groff

Marlon James

Andrew Sean Greer

Ann Patchett

Brit Bennett

Yaa Gyasi

Sergio De La Pava

Aleksandar Hemon

George Saunders

Rabih Alameddine

Jesmyn Ward

Michael Cunningham

Jennifer Egan

Louise Erdrich

Morgan Parker

Jacqueline Woodson

Steven Okazaki

Geraldine Brooks

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Scott Turow

Timothy Egan

Victor Lavalle

Moses Sumney

Moriel Rothman-Zecher

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Hector Tobar

Li Yiyun

Elizabeth Strout

C.J. Anders

Brenda J. Childs

David Handler

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Fight of the Century

Mein Surferleben

Barbarentage

Philip Gourevitch

The award-winning debut by the acclaimed author of Cold New World. Named by The New York Times Book Review as a top ten nonfiction book of 1986, this seminal piece of cross-cultural journalism is an account of a white American's experience teaching black students in South Africaan account essential for its incisive coverage of the student anti-apartheid movement, as well as for the unpretentious charms of its prose.

A Year in the Land of Apartheid

Crossing the Line

Climbing with Mollie

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2016 WINNER OF THE 2016 WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life. William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world's most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”—Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”—The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World. What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTION Praise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.”—The Village Voice “Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Growing Up in Harder Country

Cold New World

Presents a report on the state of working class teenagers in America, from Mexican-American gang members in Washington to white supremacists outside Los Angeles

Finnegan comenzó a hacer surf de pequeño en Hawái y California. En los años setenta, tras finalizar sus estudios universitarios, su pasión le llevó a dejarlo todo y emprender un viaje iniciático por Samoa, Indonesia, Fiyi, Java, Australia y Sudáfrica. Galardonado con el premio Pulitzer 2016, Años salvajes es una fascinante historia de aventuras y una autobiografía literaria de primerísimo nivel. Es, además, y sin ningún género de dudas, el mejor libro sobre surf que se haya escrito nunca

Años Salvajes

Among Africa's suffering is the little- known war in Mozambique, now in its second decade. Finnegan traveled through the country in 1988 to assess the impact of a war waged by guerrillas who are armed and often directed by South Africa. He tells a compelling story of rural misery caused by the war, which in turn offers a fertile ground for its continuation. Finnegan's narrative includes historical background and critical analysis of the Mozambique government whose policies have not created an inclusive framework for the nation. Finnegan is drawn to the conclusion that Mozambique's peasants long have been denied the fruits of peace: first under centuries of Portuguese colonialism; and now as they are exposed to the current war that is destroying their future.

The Harrowing of Mozambique

A Complicated War

A journey through four areas of America with the author examining the country's growing poverty class and its adolescents, focusing on drug-taking and drug-trafficking. The author is a staff reporter for the New Yorker.

Growing Up in a Harder Country

Agata Ostrowska

NAJLEPSZA KSIĄŻKA O SURFINGU, JAKA KIEDYKOLWIEK ZOSTAŁA NAPISANA Surfing to sport, lecz tylko dla tych, którzy przyglądają mu się z boku. Dla wtajemniczonych jest czymś znacznie więcej: pięknym nałogiem, wymagającym nauczycielem, niebezpiecznym zajęciem, sposobem na życie. Dni barbarzyńców to oldskulowa historia przygodowa, intelektualna autobiografia, literackie kino drogi, a także niezwykła eksploracja stopniowego doskonalenia wymagającej, mało rozumianej sztuki, jaką jest surfing. W pogoni za falą łatwo jest rzucić wszystko... Ale czy jesteś na to gotowy? ** William Finnegan (ur. 1957) – amerykański pisarz i korespondent wojenny, wieloletni publicysta „New Yorkera”. Laureat licznych nagród dziennikarskich za teksty o konfliktach w różnych rejonach świata. W nagrodzonych Pulitzerem Dniach barbarzyńców składa hołd swojej największej pasji, jaką jest surfing, oraz zdaje intymną relację z życia, którego rytm podyktowały fale. „Zapierająca dech w piersiach”. „The New York Times” „Dzieło sztuki”. Geoff Dyer, „The Observer” „Olśniewająca”. „Los Angeles Times” Wymieniona na liście wakacyjnych lektur Baracka Obamy. Zdobywca Nagrody Pulitzera w kategorii Autobiografia. Powyższy opis pochodzi od wydawcy

Dni barbarzyńców. Życie na fali

"Documents better than most a particularly complicated and historically significant relationship of journalism to politics."—Chandra Mukerji, coeditor of Rethinking Popular Culture

Travels with Black South African Reporters

Dateline Soweto

Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who—fearing government disapproval—may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited several of these reporters during the May 1994 election and describes their post-apartheid working experience in a new preface and epilogue.

William Finnegan

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