Two Words for Charles Slack: "Keep Driving"

books:

	• Blue Fairways: Three Months, Sixty Courses, No Mulligans Charles Slack Owl Books, 2000 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Slack scores an ace

If you've ever topped a drive off the first tee or missed a three-footer on 18 while trying record your career low round, you'll be able to identify with Charles Slack's golf game. When it comes to writing, though, he's scratch. One brief example will suffice. Describing the contrast between the front and back nines at the Ponce De Leon course in St. Augustine Florida, he says, "The back nine plunges into the jungle with the suddenness of a Disney ride, into a lush, dark, secretive world of mangrove swamps and ponds curving tantalizingly like lost lagoons. Moving from the ninght to the tenth holes is like putting down a volume of P.G. Wodehouse and picking up Heart of Darkness, all in one morning."

The book is filled with wonderful insights like that one and reminds us on nearly every page of the real reasons why golfers love this sometimes maddening, often magical, game. For those of us who never will have the pleasure of sharing a round with Charles Slack, this book is a delightful substitute.

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A fun book for duffers or pros.

When I read the description on the jacket I thought, "No way will this work. He's going to tell us about the 60 rounds he shot, stroke by stroke, such as.... and on the seventh, a tough par five, I got out my trusty three wood etc., etc., etc." It is that but it is more. Slack shares with us the feeling of what it is like to stand at the first tee of a course you have never played on a beautiful spring morning in New England. He introduces us to the people he meets on the course, from the potato farmers of Maine to the Florida "snowbirds" who flew South to escape the Northern winters. Did the book work? I'm getting my clubs ready to try a West Coast version.

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Could have been better

Great book on golf. Gives a great look at courses up and down the east coast. There was, however, too much on the history of the towns instead of more on the history of the course and more on the actual rounds he was playing. Was "On The Road" for the golfing enthusiast.

Even Bessie the Cow would Enjoy this Book

Blue Fairways is thoroughly enjoyable. Slack's sense of humor, coupled with his self-deprecating writing style, make this a must read -- golfer or not. I laughed out loud and also cringed as he described some less-than-stellar golf moments. For those of us who do golf, who couldn't identify with The Look of Pity? Non-golfers will enjoy the way Slack captures what most of us will never have a chance to witness first hand -- the essence of what remains of small towns and hospitality as they teeter on the brink of chain restaurants and cynicism.

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Two Words for Charles Slack: "Keep Driving"

A perfect blend of of travel journal and salute to public golf. Anyone with a high handicap, who has played with bare-chested strangers with even higher handicaps, on crowded bald fairways with bumpy greens, will appreciate this book.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

In 1996, Charles Slack, a golfing everyman, threw his clubs in the trunk of his car and started on a pilgrimage down Route 1, playing the public courses all along the East Coast of the United States. As he tells the story of this extraordinary journey, he introduces a new set of partners with each round and opens a window into a new locale. Traveling from the potato fields of northern Maine to the manicured suburbs of Connecticut, from the worn-down urban centers of the Northeast corridor to the sun-drenched havens of the South, Slack chronicles the best and the worst of the public golf experience. Here in the land of new beginnings, he lives out every golfer's fantasy: a fresh start and a pristine fairway each and every morning. It is a charming tale of a quintessentially American journey of discovery.

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