7/5/2023 0 Comments William finnegan book![]() ![]() Ironically, when it was published in 2015, “Barbarian Days” became Finnegan’s best-selling and most-acclaimed book. It was like, ‘Really, can I justify spending months and years on a book about my hobby?’ It seemed so lightweight and lame. “These subjects were important with a capital ‘I,’ where the urgency of the topic made you want to get the word out quickly,” Finnegan said. He chipped away at his surfing memoir for more than two decades, in between reports on humanitarian crises and geopolitics, and books about South African apartheid and American poverty. “So I thought, since the stereotype of surfers is not necessarily the best-informed people around, I could see other policy wonks saying, ‘Oh, wait. “I was involved in policy debates and criminal justice and I was editorializing about it,” he said. Which has never been considered serious stuff, of course, except by serious surfers.įinnegan refers to writing that story as “coming out of the closet as a surfer.” So it was something of a surprise to readers when, in 1992, he published the instant classic two-part story “Playing Doc’s Games” about surfing with Doc Renneker in San Francisco and, in part, about his lifelong obsession with the sport. To put it bluntly, Finnegan writes about serious stuff. ![]()
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