William Finnegan

**Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography**Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List“Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times MagazineBarbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: 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 them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art.

2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoirist of Barbarian Days William Finnegan had devoted his days to chasing waves as a lifelong surfer. When his adolescent daughter, Mollie, proves to be a natural-born climber, Finnegan follows his newfound passion toward rock climbing. It’s an arduous apprenticeship, and it turns the parent-child dynamic on its head, as Mollie slips into the role of coach and mentor, while her father has to push his limits to keep pace.Finnegan takes listeners deep into the world of climbing–indoors and out, from climbing gyms to rock faces in Central Park, Mexico and Canada. Mollie, a wry and gentle soul who had shown no previous interest in sports, grows into a ferociously gifted climber, and she leads the way. What begins as a hobby for the father-daughter duo becomes an obsession, as they start taking every opportunity to slip on their climbing shoes, chalk up their hands, and attack problems, climber-speak for routes. They learn a new language of specialized moves and rock types, they seek tougher climbs and forge new memories–not just muscle memories. Through it all, they add a new dimension to their relationship. As he and Mollie start climbing outdoors, tackling harder and higher climbs, the endeavor increasingly takes on another aspect: danger, which climbers call exposure. Finnegan offers a candid and gripping look at risk, fear, and humility in the pursuit of a perilous hobby. While he navigates the boundaries of trust and adventure, as well as the far edge of his physical limits, he reminds listeners that to fall is to be human.This Audible Original includes an additional interview Finnegan did with his daughter, Mollie, for the story.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days, this narrative nonfiction classic documents the rising inequality and cultural alienation that presaged the crises of today. “A status report on the American Dream [that] gets its power [from] the unpredictable, rich specifics of people’s lives.”— Time “[William] Finnegan’s real achievement is to attach identities to the steady stream of faceless statistics that tell us America’s social problems are more serious than we want to believe.”— The Washington Post A fifteen-year-old drug dealer in blighted New Haven, Connecticut; a sleepy Texas town transformed by crack; Mexican American teenagers in Washington State, unable to relate to their immigrant parents and trying to find an identity in gangs; jobless young white supremacists in a downwardly mobile L.A. suburb. William Finnegan spent years embedded with families in four communities across the country to become an intimate observer of the lives he reveals in Cold New World . What emerges from these beautifully rendered portraits is a prescient and compassionate book that never loses sight of its subjects’ humanity. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A LOS ANGELES TIMES BEST NONFICTION SELECTIONPraise for Cold New World “Unlike most journalists who drop in for a quick interview and fly back out again, Finnegan spent many weeks with families in each community over a period of several years, enough time to distinguish between the kind of short-term problems that can beset anyone and the longer-term systemic poverty and social disintegration that can pound an entire generation into a groove of despair.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “The most remarkable of William Finnegan’s many literary gifts is his compassion. Not the fact of it, which we have a right to expect from any personal reporting about the oppressed, but its coolness, its clarity, its ductile strength. . . . Finnegan writes like a dream. His prose is unfailingly lucid, graceful, and specific, his characterization effortless, and the pull of his narrative pure seduction.” — The Village Voice“Four astonishingly intimate and evocative portraits. . . . All of these stories are vividly, honestly and compassionately told. . . . While Cold New World may make us look in new ways at our young people, perhaps its real goal is to make us look at ourselves.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Powerful, instructive, and full of humanity, this book challenges the current understanding of the war that has turned Mozambique―a naturally rich country―into the world's poorest nation. Before going to Mozambique, William Finnegan saw the war, like so many foreign observers, through a South African lens, viewing the conflict as apartheid's "forward defense." This lens was shattered by what he witnessed and what he heard from Mozambicans, especially those who had lived with the bandidos armado , the "armed bandits" otherwise known as the Renamo rebels. The shifting, wrenching, ground-level stories that people told combine to form an account of the war more local and nuanced, more complex, more African ―than anything that has been politically convenient to describe.A Complicated War combines frontline reporting, personal narrative, political analysis, and comparative scholarship to present a picture of a Mozambique harrowed by profound local conflicts―ethnic, religious, political and personal. Finnegan writes that South Africa's domination and destabilization are basic elements of Mozambique's plight, but he offers a subtle description and analysis that will allow us to see the post-apartheid region from a new, more realistic, if less comfortable, point of view.

The award-winning debut by the acclaimed author of Cold New World .Named by The New York Times Book Review as a top ten nonfiction book of 1986, this seminal piece of cross-cultural journalism is an account of a white American's experience teaching black students in South Africaan account essential for its incisive coverage of the student anti-apartheid movement, as well as for the unpretentious charms of its prose.

Dateline Soweto documents the working lives of black South African reporters caught between the mistrust of militant blacks, police harrassment, and white editors who―fearing government disapproval―may not print the stories these reporters risk their lives to get. William Finnegan revisited several of these reporters during the May 1994 election and describes their post-apartheid working experience in a new preface and epilogue.

Le surf ressemble à Un sport, un passe-temps. Pour ses initiés, c'est bien plus : une addiction merveilleuse, une initiation exigeante, un art de vivre. Elevé en Californie et à Hawaï, William Finnegan a commencé le surf enfant. Après l'université, il a traqué les vagues aux quatre coins du monde, errant des îles Fidji à l'Indonésie, des plages bondées de Los Angeles aux déserts australiens, des townships de Johannesburg aux falaises de l'île de Madère. D'un gamin aventureux, passionné de littérature, il devint un écrivain, un reporter de guerre pour le New Yorker. À travers ses mémoires, il dépeint une vie à contre-courant, à la recherche d'une autre voie, au-delà des canons de la réussite, de l'argent et du carriérisme ; et avec une infinie pudeur se dessine le portrait d'un homme qui aura trouvé dans son rapport à l'océan une échappatoire au monde et une source constante d'émerveillement. Ode à l'enfance, à l'amitié et à la famille, Jours Barbares formule une éthique de vie, entre le paradis et l'enfer des vagues, où l'océan apparaît toujours comme un purgatoire. Un livre rare dont on ne ressort pas tout à fait indemne, entreHell's Angels de Hunter S. Thompson etInto The Wild de Jon Krakauer.William Finnegan a acquis ses galons de journaliste lors de la guerre civile au Soudan, en Afrique du Sud pendant l'Apartheid, dans les Balkans ou à Mogadiscio. Ses reportages sur les théâtres d'opérations sont le fruit de longues immersions et de patientes observations, ou, comme il aime à le résumer : "Je fouine, je parle aux gens, j'attends.' Il a reçu en 2016 pour Jours Barbares le prestigieux Prix Pulitzer.

William Finnegan a passé sa vie à naviguer entre les théâtres d'opération et les vagues, une existence entre deux eaux qu'il a racontée dans un livre inoubliable et merveilleux : Jours Barbares. À la naissance de sa fille Mollie, il s'est rangé des planches. À ses douze ans, lorsqu'elle se révèle une grimpeuse-née, l'écrivain-reporter décide de la suivre dans son apprentissage. Tandis que Mollie endosse le rôle d'entraîneur et de mentor, voire de gourou, son père se doit de repousser sans cesse ses limites pour suivre son rythme, bousculant quelque peu la dynamique parent-enfant. Il raconte alors l'escalade comme l'envers de sa propre obsession pour l'eau, non plus la quête éperdue de ces "montagnes qui chancellent au milieu de l'océan', mais la recherche frénétique de vagues tortueuses en forme de pics à gravir. À travers ce récit d'initiation, William Finnegan nous guide dans le monde singulier de la grimpe – des salles d'escalade de New York ou des blocs de Central Park aux parois rocheuses du Vermont ou aux falaises du Mexique et du Canada. Mollie, adolescente douce et ironique, ouvre la voie, et ce qui commence comme un passe-temps pour le père et la fille devient vite une obsession où toute occasion est bonne pour enfiler les chaussons et attaquer les "problèmes'' sur le mur ou les "itinéraires'' sur la paroi. Ensemble, ils apprennent un nouveau langage et se forgent de nouveaux souvenirs. À mesure qu'ils se lancent dans des ascensions toujours plus hautes et toujours plus délicates, ils font aussi l'apprentissage d'une notion cardinale : l'expérience du danger, ce que les grimpeurs nomment l'exposition. Et en creux, une leçon de vie simple mais décisive : tomber, c'est être humain.Formidable plongée dans le monde de l'escalade, Avec Mollie offre un regard tendre, bienveillant sur cette relation unique entre un père et une fille.