Bury Me In A Pot Bunker – Pete Dye with Mark Shaw, 1995 [Revised 1999] ★★

Golf's Bogeyman Looks Back

Resentment is the price many incur for being forward-thinking. This is true as well when designing golf courses.

When Pete Dye oversaw the opening of his Harbour Town Golf Links in South Carolina in time to host a 1969 PGA Tour event, tournament participants were apoplectic. Greens were much too small. Bunkers were much too large. Trees were everywhere.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce, 1916 ★★★½

A Portrait of Many Parts

There were times reading A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man where I was convinced that this was not only a great novel, but the greatest ever written in the whole history of mankind.

Other times, I felt it wasn’t even very good.

Still, consider this not only an appreciation of a literary cornerstone, but a recommendation. A Portrait Of The Artist is well worth your time. Just be aware that it goes on some wide tangents and gets a bit preachy.

Grace And Power – Sally Bedell Smith, 2004 ★★½

Love, American Style

Power couples are formidable when seen from the outside; the realities of any romance built around image concerns and status enhancement are more complicated. Take the glamorous Jackie Kennedy and her husband, the 35^th President of the United States.

As explained by Sally Bedell Smith, it was a bond complicated by Jack Kennedy’s needs to lead a nation and squeeze in as much extramarital sex as possible. Jackie’s job was to support her husband through his travails and ignore his myriad infidelities as best she could.

The Body In The Library – Agatha Christie, 1942 ★★★

Murder Most Cozy

When you read a book that helped spawn an entire subgenre, you tend to look for signs of aborning fecundity.

Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple is to cozy mysteries what James Bond is to spy fiction: The first name that springs to mind when discussing the genre. Think murder in a quiet town, a dash of elegant humor and no big emotions, and you think Marple.

Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall – Spike Milligan, 1971 ★★½

Goon Goes to War

There’s nothing so tragic that laughter can’t be mined from it. Not even World War II.

Of course, a lot depends on who is doing the mining.

Back in the 1950s, Spike Milligan redefined comedy in Great Britain as a performer and lead writer on radio’s “The Goon Show.” Before all that, in 1940, Milligan took time out of his young life to help beat back the Nazi war machine, as a draftee in an artillery regiment.

King Edward III – William Shakespeare & others, c. 1594 ★★½

Making a Case for Number 39

William Shakespeare is commonly credited with having written 38 plays, many if not most regarded as classics to this day. Why not make room for another?

The answer is an easy no if the play is not up to the standard one expects from the Bard of Avon. Much of the time this patriotism pageant unspools, the result is uneven, as more sensitive members of academia put it. But then you find yourself catching sparks of true genius and wit that, if not exclusive to Shakespeare, ring with his singular voice.

Did Shakespeare lend a hand? The evidence suggests a qualified yes.

Land Of Black Gold – Hergé, 1939-1940/1948-1950 [Revised 1971] ★★★★

Worth the Wait

How much can you expect from a Tintin book that took five calendar decades to reach us in its final form? Logically not a lot, but logic has a way of being happily ignored in the world of Tintin.

Such is the case for Land Of Black Gold, at least for me.