As the years went by, he continued his reluctance to come out of the closet and reveal his fierce devotion to surfing-which ironically is what helped pave his less-traveled path into a career of serious journalism. He has published four previous books on such gritty topics as apartheid in South Africa, a civil war in Mozambique and troubled teens in America at the intersection of poverty and drugs.
As a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades, he has traveled the world covering political conflicts, racism, neo-nazi gangs, and social injustices with a courageous fly-on-the-wall spirit. Disclaimer here: William (Bill) Finnegan is my first cousin and I have been a true fan throughout his long, distinguished career. That piece is still on many reader's short list as "the best piece of surf writing, ever".
Who would have ever imagined a surfer would win the Pulitzer Prize for a memoir about surfing? Surely no one, unless they have read William Finnegan's latest book, Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life, ( Penguin Press), or his career-changing 1992 two-part New Yorker article, Playing Doc's Games, about a daring league of surfers in San Francisco, led by one particularly extreme surfer known as "Doc".
0 kommentar(er)
