Hi, it’s Vanessa, your ENLIGHTENMENT host,

I love to travel, and read books about other amazing places I love and would love to visit. I’m hoping there are other travelers, both active and armchair, who feel the same. So for us, here is the Wanderlust Book Club, which alternates every month with the Golden State Club (books about California).

Because it’s summer, let’s go surfing now! Come on a surfin’ safari with me this August as we read Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. a memoir by William Finnegan, a writer for The New Yorker, about his lifelong love of surfing and chasing waves around the globe.

Below is the book description . Join me at Ruhstaller BSMT for a book discussion over drinks.

Ruhstaller BSMT has a variety of beers on tap, as well as wine, kombucha, canned mocktails and sodas, and sparkling water— feel free to BYO food.

Claim your seat - Register here on our Eventbrite page.

*****

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.