![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The fighting gets only worse after the Finnegans (there are six of them) pick up and move to Honolulu. He boxes friends in his front yard, gets into fistfight after fistfight. His life in Southern California in the 1950s and early ‘60s sounds in many ways halcyon, full of beach gear and Volkswagen buses and wharf rats and characters with “PhDs in having fun.” It’s also filled with violence. ![]() … That cracking, fugitive patch is where I come from.” “With me it’s not a matter of packing up or staying on,” he writes, “but rather of being always half poised to flee … to throw myself into some nearby patch of ocean. Surfing, he realizes deep into this sweeping, glorious memoir, is home. Surfing is the through line, the one constant in a peripatetic life. Before he was a celebrated magazine writer (and author of five books), he taught high school in a poor, black part of Cape Town, South Africa tended bar and washed pots on Australia’s Gold Coast worked the freight trains as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and pumped gas in the San Fernando Valley.īefore, during and after all those careers, in nearly every stage of his life, Finnegan has surfed. William Finnegan is a staff writer at the New Yorker where, for nearly three decades, he’s covered civil wars (in South Sudan and Somalia), tracked narcotraficantes (in Mexico) and embedded with gangs of neo-Nazi teens (in the Antelope Valley). ![]()
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