In 1992, Finnegan wrote a multi-part story for The New Yorker called 'Playing Doc's Game.' In it, he told the story of an extroverted surfing mystic named Mark Renneker (known as 'Doc'), who resided in San Francisco's Ocean Beach surfing community. He eventually returns to civilization, but never quite shakes the surfing bug. It's here he meets the writer Bryan Di Salvatore, a fellow scholar-vagrant, and thus set in motion an epic, globe-spanning endless summer, one that leads to experiences influential in the yet-to-be journalist's later career. A few years later, after dropping out of college at UC Santa Cruz and moving to Lahaina, the wayward intellectual embraces the itinerant surf bum lifestyle that would come to define this next period of his life. It's Finnegan's first taste of Hawaii, but not his last. He soon finds respite in surfing some of the iconic spots he learned about from magazines greedily consumed while growing up in Southern California. Finnegan's parents had moved to Hawaii for work, and the son quickly found himself embroiled in a low-stakes race war ('situationist, not doctrinaire,' he's quick to note) at his junior high.

This story, however, starts in Honolulu in 1967. In the last year, he has written a number of terrific pieces that had nothing at all to do with surfing, including one about the ongoing fight for a livable minimum wage in the United States, and another about fleeting ups and downs of gold prospecting in the Peruvian Andes. Throughout his award-winning journalistic career, Finnegan has reported from the front lines of wars and other areas in turmoil South Africa at the end of apartheid, Sudan, Mexico, and countless others. That his memoir would be almost entirely concerned with wave riding is a bit of a surprise, if a welcome one. Finnegan lovingly remembers every break, treating them like old friends who only occasionally tried to brutally murder him. Honolulu, LA, Fiji, Australia, Madeira, San Francisco. In fact, there is no wave in his memoir Barbarian Days that Finnegan can't describe in intimate detail. It was more that they scrambled it.' Longtime New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan is being modest here, relating one of many spiritually resonant surfing experiences on Fiji's Tavarua Island in 1978. 'It wasn't that the waves beggared language. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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Barbarian days a surfing life