Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #958277 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Amazon.com
Perhaps the Royal and Ancient game's most majestic appeal is simply this: Stand up on the first tee and what you survey down the fairway is a beckoning landscape of possibility, renewal, improvement, and hope. All mark the scorecard of Blue Fairways, a lovely pilgrimage that begins in Maine, ends in Florida, and in a journey of three months plays 60 public courses from one end of Route 1 to the other. It's a chronicle that inspires envy. Every duffer dreams of dropping out and devoting himself wholeheartedly to his golfing jones; Charles Slack actually lives it.

Like all good golfing odysseys, Slack's doesn't take place solely on the golf course. There's plenty of golf, sure, and Slack does a fine job of capturing the flavor of each of the outposts he tees off from--be it a track as grand as Pinehurst or as modest as the short municipal pitch-and-putter he navigates with the mayor of Jersey City. But the story of Blue Fairways is really the story of the people he meets and plays with, the nongolfing lessons he takes from them, and the senses of place--some elegant, some hopelessly threadbare--he experiences from city to suburb to town. Some 2,200 miles after the first drive, he's shaved a few strokes off his game, felt an explosion of midlife freedom, and come to grips with more than his clubs. "It took sixty golf courses," he writes, "to convince me of a truth about golf and life so obvious and facile sounding, I probably could have gotten it from a fortune cookie or a Salada tea bag: Getting there is nothing; the journey is all." The fun of Blue Fairways is that he indeed reached that conclusion through a golf ball, and not through one of its crystal cousins. --Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal
Slack, a former business reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and feature writer for many national magazines, takes us on a journey along Route 1 down the east coast of the United States, playing public golf courses from Maine to Key West. The author lives out every duffer's fantasy: a fresh start and an untarnished fairway each day. From his first round in northern Maine to his final round in Florida, he recounts the best and worst of his experiences on his three-month odyssey, introducing a new set of partners with each stop. As Slack hacks his way through the suburbs and urban centers of the Northeast on his way to the sun-drenched golfing havens of the South, the journey becomes one of discovery as well. More than just one man's account of a golfing junket, this is an absorbing tale about America. Recommended for all public libraries.APeter Ward, Smithtown Lib., NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The golf odyssey has become a popular gambit for enterprising journalists who want an excuse to travel and play golf (William Hallberg's The Soul of Golf, 1997, may be the best of the genre). Slack has added some new wrinkles to the formula: like William Least Heat Moon, he traveled only blue highways (U.S. Route 1, from the Canadian border in Maine to Key West), and unlike Hallberg, he played only public golf courses. Slack is not a particularly good golfer, and he writes endearingly from the hacker's point of view. (His relative newness to the game does produce the occasional irritating tick: he insists, for example, on using golf as a verb, a linguistic gaffe akin to shortening San Francisco to Frisco.) Overall, though, his story is a fascinating one, both in terms of how it displays the game's hypnotic hold over players at all skill levels and especially in its evocation of the wide variety of public golf in this country, from palatial Pinehurst to the refurbished inner-city courses along the eastern seaboard. Bill Ott