Its culturally manufactured image is schizophrenic, slack-lining between dreadlocked bacchanalia and exalted communion with nature. They were the goal. The surf was your refuge, your happy hiding place, but it was also a hostile wildernessβa dynamic, indifferent world.
The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power beyond measure. Before we can ride them, we have to read them. Finnegan would caution against any gratuitous comparisons. The margins of the global surf scene seem a particularly unlikely sphere from whence to emerge a distinguished war reporter and nonfiction stylist.
Finnegan was not your garden-variety surf bum. Barbarian Days braids the chase for world-class waves with personal intellectual history and social analysis. His other books include Dateline Saweto , which follows the lives of black South African reporters working for white editors under apartheid, A Complicated War , a portrait of the Mozambican Civil War, and Cold New World , a sobering study of American cyclical poverty and inequality.
Finnegan was gracious enough to spend an afternoon answering my questions over email, after Skype failed us, the day before a surf trip to El Salvador no less. Read bio. Apply to our first recruitment drive of the year!
