Review by New York Times Review
CORRUPTION IN AMERICA: From Benjamin Franklin's Snuff Box to Citizens United, by Zephyr Teachout. (Harvard University, $18.95.) The founding fathers were deeply concerned with the threat corruption posed to their emergent government. Teachout, a Fordham law professor, powerfully argues that their commitment to safeguarding against it has been undermined by the Supreme Court since at least the 1970s - especially in the realm of corporations' financial contributions to politics. I REFUSE, by Per Petterson. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Graywolf, $16.) The two men at the heart of this story, Tommy and Jim, rediscover each other after decades apart, and marvel at the divergent paths their lives took. Petterson, the Norwegian novelist who wrote "Out Stealing Horses," examines the forces that pulled "the boys in different directions, the small quiet moments that forged their friendship and then pulled it apart," Harriet Lane wrote here. BARBARIAN DAYS: A Surfing Life, by William Finnegan. (Penguin, $17.) Finnegan, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for autobiography, recalls his shifting relationship to the sport: As an adolescent, he found in surfing a respite from the petty cruelties of middle school in Hawaii; later, it led him to join hordes of young surfers across the world in search of the ideal wave. THE INCARNATIONS, by Susan Barker. (Touchstone, $16.) In the taxi he drives in contemporary Beijing, Wang Jun finds a series of mysterious letters - signed by writers who claim to be his soul mate - that link him to five key episodes across 1,500 years of Chinese history. Barker's wildly inventive novel reveals Wang's previous roles, in the form of his earlier lives, in each of those moments from his country's past. THE BROTHERS: The Road to an American Tragedy, by Masha Gessen. (Riverhead, $16.) From their childhoods in Central Asia and Russia to their early days in the United States, Gessen pieces together the lives of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the two Chechen immigrants responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. A SPOOL OF BLUE THREAD, by Anne Tyler. (Ballantine, $16.) Tyler's novel chronicles the multigenerational Whitshanks, who remain anchored to their family home in Baltimore, and the celebrations, secrets and joys that stitch them together. "Tyler has a knack for turning sitcom situations into something far deeper and more moving," our reviewer, Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, wrote. LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, by Hayden Herrera. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) This illuminating biography of the sculptor (1904-88) traces his early influences - as the son of a distant Japanese father and mercurial American mother, Noguchi rarely felt at home, and was shaped by his diverse travels. Herrera's account is a fitting companion guide to the artist who "sought and found, by making sculpture, a way to embed himself in the earth, in nature, in the world."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 29, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Abandoning religion while a youngster in California and Hawaii, author Finnegan (a New Yorker staff writer) became an obsessive surfer. This memoir takes us around the world's beaches as he pursues what a compatriot describes as not a sport, but a path. Readers who do not share Finnegan's preoccupation may need a little assistance along the way. Maps would have been helpful to those unfamiliar with the geography of Hawaii or Australia, not to mention Fiji or Tonga or Madeira, in all of which the author spends considerable time (as he also does, unexpectedly, in San Francisco and, more improbably yet, New York). Helpful, too, would have been diagrams of waves and boards, and a great deal more explanation (or a glossary) of the terminology and intricate skills to which Finnegan refers with frustrating offhandedness. Absent an insider's knowledge, much of the presumed drama or beauty inherent in these accounts is regrettably lessened, at least for nonsurfers. Other aspects of his life are addressed only superficially: women, friendships, finances, even the books he loves. There exists a kind of cult readership for surfer lit including novels (Kem Nunn's Tapping the Source, 1984) and memoirs (Chas Smith's Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell,2013) and it is in that albeit small world that this book will find an audience.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this panoramic and fascinating memoir, long-time New Yorker staff writer Finnegan pays tribute to the ancient art of surfing. Arriving on Oahu from California at 13, in the mid-1960s, Finnegan discovered that Hawaiian public school students weren't particularly welcoming to haoles; surfing brought him acceptance and contentment, and would remain central to his life for the next half century. In the late 1970s, he set out in pursuit of a perfect wave, and spent five years circumnavigating the globe with long stops in Polynesia, Australia, Thailand, Indonesia, and South Africa. The social inequality he witnessed led him to journalism, but after his return to the U.S. and fatherhood, the waves still beckoned, even if that meant enduring a January swell off Long Island. Throughout this lengthy work, Finnegan never loses sight of the marginalized, such as the black students he taught in apartheid South Africa. Yet the core of the book is a surfing chronicle, and Finnegan possesses impeccable short-board bona fides. As a middle-aged, professionally successful man, he grapples with his aging body and the contradictions of surfing's commodification, at one point returning as a high-end tourist to a wave he pioneered as a penniless kid. Surfing (mostly) remains a man's world, and Finnegan's attempts to mention the women he loved seem like afterthoughts. Nevertheless, he has written a revealing and magisterial account of a beautiful addiction. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Finnegan (staff writer, The New Yorker; Cold New World) recounts his experiences as a surfer, beginning with his teen years surfing in Hawaii, covering his globe-trotting search for the perfect wave, and concluding with his current lifestyle fitting waves in between work and family. Traveling to Samoa, Fiji, South Africa, and Madeira among other places, Finnegan chronicles the obsession that drives surfers like himself to take on the dangers of sharks, wipeouts, and near drowning all in pursuit of the heightened experience that surfing provides. The constants flowing through this part coming-of-age story and part travelog are the ocean and the waves that the author tries to better understand. The result is an up-close and personal homage to the surfing lifestyle through the author's journey as a lifelong surfer. Finnegan's writing is polished and bold, but the lengthy descriptions of individual waves and their personalities may be daunting to the average reader. -VERDICT This high-caliber memoir will best appeal to audiences with an interest in surfing. [See Prepub Alert, 1/25/15.]-Stacy Shaw, Orange, CA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An award-winning staff writer for the New Yorker offers a probing account of his lifetime passion for surfing. Though Finnegan (Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country, 1998, etc.) was not "a beach kid," family friends showed him how to enjoy riding the waves of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Eventually, surfing became an interest he pursued with growing avidity as his parents moved between Southern California and Hawaii. Between detailed accounts of his encounters with the waves of San Onofre and Honolua Bay, Finnegan interweaves stories of growing up a bookish boy among Hawaiian natives who hated him for being haole (white) yet also finding friendship among fellow outsiders who saw beyond race and bonded over surfing. A "sunburnt pagan," Finnegan was gradually initiated into the deeper mysteries of the ocean that created the waves he rode with such dedicated absorption. He became like the early Hawaiian pioneers of surfing: not exactly "barbaric" (as these practitioners were considered by Christian missionaries) but still part of a group "typecast as truants and vagrants." In the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the author pushed the limits of freedom by experimenting with sex and drugs and dropping in and out of college. Yet surfing remained a constant throughout the chaos of his youth. In his mid-20s, he began an epic quest for the ultimate wave that took him to Guam, Samoa, Fiji, Australia, Java, and, eventually, Africa. Finnegan's journals of his experiences form the backbone of his minutely detailed rendering of days spent sizing up swells and riding to glory. As brilliant and lucid as some of these descriptions are, they sometimes overwhelm the rest of the narrative, which includes, among many others, stories about the life-changing experiences in apartheid South Africa that turned him away from fiction and toward a career as a prominent journalist. The book nevertheless provides a fascinating look inside the mind of a man terminally in love with a magnificent obsession. A lyrical and intense memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
