The prose needs to be ironed out, but this memoir offers an endearing look at golf as a skill and a cosmos of love.
Hagman remembers days spent making friendships while playing favorite golf courses.
It is said that for some people golf is not just a game, it’s a calling. That could certainly be said of Hagman, who takes as many days as she can away from her day job as a Swedish government economist to hit the links. Here, she recounts 19 episodes in which golfing helped shape who she is, from experiencing the courses in a deep, near mystical way, to gathering a good handful of friendships, some fleeting, some enduring, some seemingly destined. The memoir is a curious, ultimately enjoyable and illuminating exercise in unvarnished clarity, taking advantage of the English-as-a-second-language voice with disarming frankness. Superficially, the language may cry out for polish—“The aim and purpose of this book is to inspire every reader of this book to go out there and play on a course with an open mind towards players you never met before”—but the trick is to hear the written words, preferably in a Swedish accent, as Hagman seizes the magical qualities of linksland and why it moves her so. The allure for Hagman may be because these courses—the Old Course at St. Andrews, Belfry and the love of her life, the Ailsa Course at Turnberry—are such a far cry from her Northern climes, and her playing in mixed foursomes takes her out of her loneliness, a feeling she touches on more than once. These golf-related relationships, with both men and women, can blossom: “I was so happy to end up in the company of this man John, who enjoyed every minute out on the course….Don’t misunderstand out relationship though. We are just friends.” Much of Hagman’s charm is in her formality—“I sensed he had also chosen a life when he couldn’t become a friend with a person like me. It was a life with certain boundaries”—which melts into an elemental passion when she encounters the right golf course or the right golfer.
The prose needs to be ironed out, but this memoir offers an endearing look at golf as a skill and a cosmos of love.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491876053
Page Count: 158
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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