Fans of the sport will relish this savory slice of golf’s past, gracefully served. (51 b&w illustrations)
A polished, adroit history of America’s first golf course, studded with yarns and deep with context, from golf-writer DiPerna and the course’s manager, Keller.
In the Greenbriar country of West Virginia, in the open spaces of woodland and tumbling hills outside White Sulphur Springs, sits Oakhurst, the first golf course laid out in the US—which happened, it has been agreed, in 1884. The course was built by four young men of substance who had migrated to lovely Greenbriar for various reasons. A cousin of theirs was set to arrive, and to entertain him properly—he was a fervid golfer, a Scot temporarily plying his game in Ceylon—they designed a nine-hole course, though “design” is a grand term, for golf courses were still rather makeshift affairs at the time: even playing at St. Andrews was a matter of picking an object down the links to aim at. The four builders and their guest became the Oakhurst Club, and remained the only five members. DiPerna and Keller do an exemplary vest-pocket job outlining the history of golf, its migration from Scotland (where it evolved, though ancient traces of it can be found in France, Belgium, Holland, and elsewhere in Great Britain and Ireland), and its passage to the Greenbriar. Additionally, the authors have a sharp eye for salient and entertaining moments in the game’s history, from the part it played in the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the pleasurable stories associated with Oakhurst, such as the club’s motto, “Sure and Far,” though Russell Montague, one of the original fivesome noted that “none of us were very ‘sure’ and we certainly did not drive very ‘far.’ ” Oakhurst fell into disuse but has been restored and can be played today with the equipment of old.
Fans of the sport will relish this savory slice of golf’s past, gracefully served. (51 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8027-1371-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
That’s just right: Stanton’s is another entry in the roster of excellent works devoted to baseball, sure to please fans of...
A fan’s affectionate notes on America’s game—one whose spirit seems to be at grave risk.
Stanton, a Gen-X native of Detroit, is too young to remember the Tigers in their glory. He does, however, have a keen sense of history, one given full air in this account of a season spent in the city’s now-demolished Tiger Stadium. Detroit squads had played there since 1912, when (a few days after the Titanic sank and on the same day that Boston’s Fenway Park opened) Ty Cobb and his teammates faced off against Cleveland’s “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. Stanton’s pages are populated by countless baseball heroes, many of whom (Charlie Gehringer, Al Kaline) are not likely to be known to readers who did not grow up Tigers fans—or to those younger than Stanton. His hero worship for these players is a constant, but he has sharper words for the modern game—and especially for the New York Yankees, a longstanding bête noire whose current six leadoff hitters earn more than the Tigers’ entire roster. The latter-day Tigers turn in only a so-so performance to punctuate Stanton’s meditation on the meaning of baseball to generations of Americans, and on a park that would soon be demolished in favor of a soulless and corporatized replacement stadium that places fans ever farther from the players. Still, as his narrative closes, Stanton lapses into celebratory reveries not unworthy of Field of Dreams: standing in a baseball diamond, he writes, “if you listen beyond the silence, if you listen with your heart, you can hear all sorts of things. You can hear your childhood, you can hear your dad and your uncles, you can hear Kaline connecting, you can hear the muted cheers of distant, ghost crowds, and you can hear your grandpa calling out from the bleachers.”
That’s just right: Stanton’s is another entry in the roster of excellent works devoted to baseball, sure to please fans of the game.Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-27288-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A delightful collection of articles marking the 100th anniversary of one of the country's best and most durable hunting and fishing magazines. As Merritt (Goodbye Liberty Belle, not reviewed) suggests in his introduction, a key to Field and Stream's longevity has been its emphasis on conservation issues, its editorial stance against encroaching industrialism, and its support of measures like uniform game laws. Founded in St. Paul, Minn., by John R. Burkhard, the magazine underwent a series of moves and name changes before landing in New York City. The pieces gathered here represent some of the very best writers in the business: Havilah Babcock, Robert Ruark, Nash Buckingham, Nick Lyons, and others. Ed Zern's waggish 1964 piece reveals that The Compleat Angler, which he found unreadable, is actually ``a turgidly political allegory'' intended to challenge the Cromwellian regime. In one of Lyons's entries we meet a legendary ``old Catskill trouting genius'' with a magic formula ``for dyeing leaders to within a chromophore of the color of eight different streams at a dozen different times of the year.'' One of the most wonderfully written articles is by a rare early female intruder in this dominantly male world: Florence A. Tasker's 1908 ``A Woman Through Husky-Land'' recounts her five- month, 4,000-mile canoe trip from Hudson Bay to the Atlantic Ocean. While there's but one piece by Zane Grey, it's a good one on fishing for horse mackerel off the Santa Barbara Islands. But the best comes from the revered Babcock, perhaps the most elegant writer ever to grace the pages of an American sporting journal. In ``When a Man's Thoughts Are Pure,'' he sets gun aside to observe quail taking a dust bath: ``I have lain in the brush and watched an entire bevy, one after another in orderly fashion, perform its fluttery ablutions.'' Marvelous reading for hunters, fishers, and naturalists. (8 pages color illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-288-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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