Surfing Life

**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 Magazine 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: 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.

Surfing Life is a study of surfing and social change that also provides insights into other experience-based contemporary subcultures and the nature of the self and social formations in contemporary society. Making use of extensive empirical material to support innovative theoretical approaches to social change, this book offers an analysis of the relationship between embodied experience, culture and the economy. With its ground breaking theoretical contributions, and its foundation in an ethnographic study of surfing culture in locations across Australia, this volume will appeal not only to those interested in the social and cultural phenomenon of surfing, but also to anyone interested in the sociology of sport and leisure, the sociology of culture and consumption, risk-taking, subcultures and theories of contemporary social change.

The inspirational story of one woman learning to surf and creating a new life in gritty, eccentric Rockaway Beach Unmoored by a failed marriage and disconnected from her high-octane life in the city, Diane Cardwell finds herself staring at a small group of surfers coasting through mellow waves toward shore--and senses something shift. Rockawayis the riveting, joyful story of one woman's reinvention--beginning with Cardwell taking the A Train to Rockaway, a neglected spit of land dangling off New York City into the Atlantic Ocean. She finds a teacher, buys a tiny bungalow, and throws her not-overly-athletic self headlong into learning the inner workings and rhythms of waves and the muscle development and coordination needed to ride them. As Cardwell begins to find her balance in the water and out, superstorm Sandy hits, sending her into the maelstrom in search of safer ground. In the aftermath, the community comes together and rebuilds, rekindling its bacchanalian spirit as a historic surfing community, one with its own quirky codes and surf culture. And Cardwell's surfing takes off as she finds a true home among her fellow passionate longboarders at the Rockaway Beach Surf Club, living out "the most joyful path through life." Rockawayis a stirring story of inner salvation sought through a challenging physical pursuit--and of learning to accept the idea of a complete reset, no matter when in life it comes.

All sports have their cultures, but surfing alone seems to have created a whole style-even a philosophy-of life. In this book, wit and wisdom and living for the wave come together to point the way to the ride of your life-or at least an enjoyable read. With the words of sages of the surf as unlikely as Mark Twain and Jack London and as close to the heart of the sport as Miki Dora, Greg Noll, Nat Young, Kelly Slater, and Laird Hamilton-and with photographs that capture the thrill of the ride-this book explains the meaning of life as only surfers can understand it. And because, as Brock Little remarks in Fade to Black, "Adrenaline is a funny drug," a book about surfing must have its dose of humor-and this one does, along with surfings undeniable rush. The perfect philosophy gift book for the true surfer. "If you accept all the doctrines of society, you'll never be a surfer."-Nat Young

If only life could be like surfing! Having "funny" hair and being embarrassed in school is hard, but when little surfer Mop studies the lessons of the waves—breathing, letting the bad waves go by, and riding the good ones—he learns how to bring the mindfulness and joy of surfing into his whole life. Celebrated San Francisco surfer-journalist-dad Jaimal Yogis teaches 4-8 year olds timeless beach wisdom with the story of Mop, a sensitive and fun-loving kid who just wants to be in the ocean. Going to school and navigating classmates can be hard—but all that goes away when little surfer Mop paddles out in the waves. With a few tips from his clever mom, Mop studies the wisdom of the water and learns to bring it into his life on land: taking deep breaths, letting the tough waves pass, and riding the good ones all the way. With newfound awareness and courage, Mop heads back to land—and school—to surf the waves of life. With stylish full-color beachy illustrations from cover to cover.

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that—in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports . . . is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy.

Through fifty years of epic stories, art, and personal ephemera, The Fletcher Family spans surfing's golden era to the present day, when bathing-suit model Dibi and competitive surfer Herbie met, to raising talented Christian and Nathan on boards and waves, to passing the torch to their skating-phenom grandson, Greyson. Herbie Fletcher is a surfing legend. Fletcher and his sons, Christian and Nathan, made a habit of doing things exceptionally well and in their own way before they became the norm. But the Fletchers are not merely trailblazing surf and skate legends; they also are counterculture and subculture icons. T Magazine referred to them as having "punk family values." Their sincere love for art and surfing and their collective DGAF attitude has earned them legions of devoted fans and friends from so many different worlds: music, fashion, streetwear, and art. The epitome of both surfer cool and punk counterculture, the Fletcher family for the first time has put together a window into their immensely colorful life. A visual memoir of this near-mythological surf family, The Fletcher Family is sure to appeal to their massive surfing fan base, young skaters, and those who are interested in the Fletcher family and their place in Southern California as a subcultural force of nature.

From the author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go To Hell, a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction One of Pearl Jam's Jeff Ament's Top 10 of 2018 It's no surprise that surfers like to party. The 1960-70s image, bolstered by Tom Wolfe and Big Wednesday, was one of mild outlaws--tanned boys refusing to grow up, spending their days drinking beer and smoking joints on the beach in between mindless hours in the water. But in the 1980s, as surf brands morphed into multibillion-dollar companies, the derelict portrait began to harm business. The external surf image became Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton, beacons of health, vitality, bravery, and clean-living. Internally, though, surfing had moved on from booze and weed to its heart's true home, its soul's twin flame: cocaine. The rise of cocaine in American popular culture as the choice of rich, white elites was matched, then quadrupled, within surf culture. The parties got wilder, the nights stretched longer, the stories became more ridiculously unbelievable. And there has been no stopping, no dip in passion. It is a forbidden love, and few, if any, outside the surf world know about this particular rhapsody. Drug use is kept very well-hidden, even from insiders, but evidence of its psychosis rears its head from time to time in the form of overdoses, bar fights, surf contests, murders, and cover-ups. Cocaine + Surfing draws back the curtain on a hopped-up, sometimes-sexy, sometimes-deadly relationship and uses cocaine as the vehicle to expose and explain the utterly absurd surf industry to outsiders.