Book review: Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life - 'meaning of life' in breaks

The lift of a wave rushing across the shallows until it rises and pitches in an explosion of foam can quickly make an addict of anyone fortunate enough to be along for the ride. And once William Finnegan sampled the sudden acceleration in the curl of a breaking wave, he found his passion.

In , the award-winning writer for describes an obsession that began in the mid-1960s in Southern California and blossomed in Hawaii, where Finnegan had to join an all-white gang for protection at school even as he surfed with his closest Hawaiian friends. But that was just the start of a lifetime of chasing waves through the islands of the Pacific and apartheid South Africa, in the frigid waters off San Francisco and the somewhat less intimidating reefs and beach breaks of Long Island and New Jersey.

Finnegan's epic adventure, beautifully told, is much more than the story of a boy and his wave, even if surfing serves as the thumping heartbeat of his life.

His time in Hawaii as a young teen is a sociological study of multiculturalism, where surviving a series of fist fights at a tough Honolulu school would win him grudging respect. When his family moved back to the Los Angeles area, the commercial capital of the post- surf boom, Finnegan was in the middle of it, spending every possible minute at the beach, honing his skills even as surfing - as well as the society around it - began to change.

A degree meant getting a job, but only as a means of funding Finnegan's Pacific travel plans with a friend, another aspiring writer. With maps and charts and a modest bankroll, they moved from island to island, searching for places that could catch and tame open-ocean swells and send them hissing down a perfectly shaped reef. Incredibly, they found it after hitching a ride with local fishermen to a tiny, heart-shaped island in Fiji called Tavarua, where they shared the water with poisonous snakes.

"The wave had a thousand moods, but in general it got better as it got bigger. At six feet [about 180cm], it was easily the best wave either of us had ever seen," Finnegan writes. "Scaled up, the mechanical regularity of the speeding hook gained soul, its roaring, sparkling depths and vaulted ceiling like some kind of recurring miracle, the tracery on the surface and the ribbed power of the wall full of delicate, now visible detail, each wave suffused with the richness of a one-off."