Bücher von William Finnegan

Winner of the Pulitzer Price and William Hill Sports Book of the Year: Barbarian Days is a deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer looking for transcendence 'that recalls early James Salter' (Geoff Dyer, Observer)Surfing only looks like a sport. To devotees, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a mental and physical study, a passionate way of life.New Yorker writer William Finnegan first started surfing as a young boy in California and Hawaii. Barbarian Days is his immersive memoir of a life spent travelling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa and beyond. Finnegan describes the edgy yet enduring brotherhood forged among the swell of the surf; and recalling his own apprenticeship to the world's most famous and challenging waves, he considers the intense relationship formed between man, board and water.Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an exacting and little-understood art. It is a memoir of dangerous obsession and enchantment. 'Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard' Sports Illustrated

Vor fünfzig Jahren verfällt William Finnegan dem Surfen. Damals verschafft es ihm Respekt, dann jagt es ihn raus in die Welt - Samoa, Indonesien, Australien, Südafrika -, als Familienvater mit Job beim New Yorker dient es der Flucht vor dem Alltag ... Barbarentage erzählt die Geschichte dieser lebenslangen Leidenschaft, sie handelt vom Fernweh, von wahren Abenteuern und den Versuchen, trotz allem ein Träumer zu bleiben. Ein Buch wie das Meer, atemberaubend schön.»Wie Into the Wild erzählt dieses Buch auf mitfühlende, kluge Weise, was passiert, wenn Ideen von Freiheit einen jungen Menschen erfassen und in die entlegensten Winkel der Welt hinausschleudern.« The New York Times Magazine»Fesselnde Abenteuergeschichte, intellektuelle Autobiografie, rastlose Meditation über Liebe, Freundschaft und Familie ... Barbarentage ist ein Buch von ergreifender Schönheit und wird Surfer und Nichtsurfer gleichermaßen begeistern.« Washington Post »Das zu lesen, was dieser Kerl über Wellen und Wasser schreibt, ist wie Hemingway über Stierkämpfe zu lesen, William Burroughs über Drogen und Updike über Ehebruch.« Sports Illustrated

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 SELECTION Praise 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