Golf Courses of the World : 365 Days offers a year’s worth of the world’s best golf courses and holes. It not only has usual suspect—Pebble Beach, and St. Andrews—but also includes courses from such exotic locales as Indonesia, Nepal, Dubai, Kenya, and Brazil.

A feast for the eyes.

Dr. Gio Viliante, the shrink who helped Davis Love and Justin Leonard overcome their mental barriers now offers his advice to the average golfer in Fearless Golf : Conquering the Mental Game

If you’ve ben playing golf for a while, your swing probably is not going to get any better. But your mental game can. Bad mental habits can wreck your round, alter your swing, and turn a tap in to a three putt disaster.

In this book, Viliante offers concrete advice on improving your mental game.

Don’t drive your self crazy with inane sports talk radio, or moronic deejays while you’re commuting. Work on your golf game instead with this audio cd from Dr. Bob Rotella. I’ve found his audio books to be quite helpful.

Putting Out Of Your Mind

Bernard Darwin On Golf

Golf boasts one of the best bodies of literature of any sport, and Bernard Darwin is among the best of those writers. The grandson of Charles Darwin, Bernard could have spent his life as a lawyer, but chose instead to write about his passion: golf. And the world is richer because he did.

I’ve read a large number of Darwin’s essays in various collections, but this is the first one I’ve seen that’s devoted exclusively to his writing.

The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf
Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: A wonderful book. It’s compelling even though you already know the outcome.

Mark Frost’s The Greatest Game Ever Played: Harry Vardon, Francis Ouimet, and the Birth of Modern Golf is one of a genre of popular histories that I really enjoy. It takes a single event or item—in this case, tthe 1913 US Open—and uses it to illuminate an entire time and place. (similar books that I’ve enjoyed were Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 and Salt: A World History)

The Greatest Game is compelling story of two lives that collide at the US Open: Francis Ouimet, a young working class amateur, and Harry Vardon, winner of six Open (British) Championships.—who, ironically, came from a very similar background to Oiumet’s.

Fairway to Heaven
by Roberta Isleib

Grade: A
Teacher’s Comments: It’s a mystery about a female golfer that can be enjoyed by men, non-golfers and people who aren’t usually mystery fans.

Out just in time for the US Open, Robert Isleib’s new mystery finds Cassie Burdette arriving in Pinehurst, North Carolina to get buried in a sandtrap of murder, kidnapping and extortion.

Of course, she doesn’t start out trying to solve a mystery. The conflicted LPGA heroine actually is there to play in a golf tournament with her estranged father—an aspiring Champions Tour pro—and her PGA Tour on-again-off-again boyfriend. At the same time, Cassie’s agreed to be the maid of honor in a nearby country club wedding.

Given Cassie’s complex relationship issues, and her stuggle to find her game, she doesn’t need any more trouble. But like Jessica Fletcher in “Murder She Wrote,” mayhem follows Cassie Burdette wherever she goes: the father of the bride-to-be is kidnapped and Cassie is forced to investigate.

Like the other books in the series, Fairway to Heaven works on several levels. As a character study, it’s pretty interesting. Cassie is complex and realistic: She’s troubled without being disturbing; feminine without being “girly” (her reactions to the bizarre wedding plans are very funny). If it were simply a “chick novel”, it would still have an audience. ( not me, though )

Isleib’s descriptions of the games of the idle rich make it work on another level. If you just extracted the wedding escapades, it would be a good comedy.

But of course, it’s a mystery. And at that, it’s also very good. It’s got an intriguing plot that would actually work even if there were no golf at all (is there a sub-genre for wedding mysteries? I don’t want to know.).

The glue that holds it all together (and the reason its being reviewd here, of course) is the golf.

Which leads me to my final thought. The title, “Fairway To Heaven” offers a nice tie-in to the US Open at Pinehurst and its most famous champion: the late Payne Stewart. It may be coincidence, but I think Isleib is too good a writer for it to be unintentional.

Geoff Shackleford offers a preview of golf books coming out this summer.