William Finnegan, Barbarian Days ****

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life is a memoir from a staff journalist at the New Yorker, focusing on his passion for surfing. It is similar to David Roberts' mountaineering memoir On the Ridge Between Life and Death in that Finnegan tempers his surfing adventures with lots of self reflection about what drives him to abandon his day-to-day responsibilities and endanger himself.

The early chapters provide an insightful picture of what Finnegan calls being a "mid-century kid." He grew up in suburban Los Angeles and Honolulu, and shows great sensitivity to the texture of that time of life. As the New York Times review says, Finnegan "combines the deep knowledge of a widely traveled hard-core surfer, the observations of a born ethnographer and the wry aplomb of a New Yorker staff writer."

He also makes clear how every surfing spot is unique and can reward lifelong study. After college, he and a friend travel the South Pacific looking for good waves by studying nautical charts.

Finding ridable waves with nautical charts was a long shot at best. We looked for south-facing island coasts that weren't "shadowed" by any barrier reef or landmass farther south. We looked for points and bays and reef passes where the shallow water showed, after one or two fathoms, a sharp drop-off to seaward... The angle of any promising patch of reef or beach was critical. The rough line along which waves might be expected to break needed to be canted away from... the open ocean to the south... We looked for offshore canyons that would focus long-interval swell... Our charts weren't perfect, and their scale was always too big to account for the individual boulders and chunks of reef that would finally make all the difference.

In the later chapters Finnegan starts to omit his non-surfing life from the story, and the book suffers for it. Overall, though, it is a clear classic.