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
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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