4 golf books that deliver the goods

Here are four new golf books you don't want to miss.

4. “The Unwritten Rules of Golf,” by Peter Post

Since golf etiquette is important, who better to expound on the subject than golf enthusiast Peter Post, the great grandson of manners maven Emily Post? The author offers advice on the many do’s and don’ts that a person needs to know to play a proper round of golf, from knowing how to deal with slow play to when a “gimme” putt is acceptable.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Unwritten Rules of Golf”:

“Of the specific course-related behaviors cited by Post Golf Survey respondents, one faux pas stands out above all others: failing to repair ball marks on the green. For the life of me, I just can’t understand how a person can hit a shot onto a green, watch the ball land, and then not look for and repair the mark that the ball has just made. But they do. On any given green during a round, I can easily find three, four, or more untouched ball marks that were freshly made that day.

“What makes this failure so tragic is that if a ball mark is repaired immediately after it’s made, the spot quickly grows back into a smooth, unscarred stretch of grass. A ball mark left unprepared, however, is an unfixable blemish that will remain visible for weeks. Even worse, these ball marks aren’t found just on the periphery of the green. They often occur near the flagstick, where they can potentially affect the putting of every golfer playing that hole.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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