Finnegan covered wars for The New Yorker and spent his whole life not telling people he was a surfer, because it sounded ridiculous coming from a serious reporter. Then he wrote this and won the Pulitzer. It starts with a thirteen-year-old haole kid getting beat up at school in Honolulu and discovering the water could be an equalizer. From there, he hitches around the Pacific in 1978 with a buddy on no money, stumbles onto an empty perfect left off an uninhabited island in Fiji (Tavarua) that’s now a resort with a waiting list, teaches in apartheid Cape Town, and freezes at Ocean Beach in San Francisco chasing giant winter swell. And then, in his forties, he lands on Madeira, a Portuguese island far out in the Atlantic where the surf is deep-water heavy. He returned for years, waiting on the right day at Jardim do Mar, and scored.