2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Biography – William Finnegan for Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

At last! A book I read before it won a Pulitzer Prize!

I wouldn’t have thought a book about surfing could be so riveting, but Finnegan finds a way to make it universal — a metaphor for anything you might become obsessed with as a way to forge your identity and give life new layers of meaning.

Try it … you’ll like it!

Book Club Mom

The winners have been announced and Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Photo: youtube.com

What’s the book about? Here is a summary from Amazon:

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…

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