William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days is not your typical surfing book. Sure, there are iconic locations in Hawaii and California and the South Pacific. Sure, there is the quest for the perfect wave. But Finnegan’s concerns are less elegiac than existential, which leads him to consider surfing through a complex and nuanced lens. What he knows is that the ocean is capricious. It can yield or it can take away. In that, it is not New Yorker Cold New World
