Barbarian Days

Raised in California and Hawaii, William Finnegan started surfing as a child, and his memoir treats the sport as an addiction, a course of study and a way of life. At a tough Honolulu school he joined a whites-only gang, even as a Hawaiian surfer was his best friend. He wandered for years through the South Pacific, Asia, Australia and Africa, and with a friend while camped on an empty Fijian island found one of the world's great waves. He looked hard at a Samoan fishing village and at Tongan dealings with Americans and Japanese, navigated the Indonesian black market while nearly dying of malaria, and later became a war reporter. The memoir became a New York Times best seller.

Barack Obama put it on his 2016 summer vacation reading list, and Paul Graham called it one of the rare books that split a reader's life into before and after.