A Hole By Hole Special--
The 2001 Holiday Gift Golf Book Selections!

If you are looking for more gift book selections, just click over to four other pages of mini-reviews: the original Coffee Table Golf Book page, the1999 Holiday Gift Book page, the 2000 Holiday Gift Book page, or the Little Golf Books page.

Of course, if you're looking for an even broader selection for the golfer you're trying to please, just click to the Pastbooks Page and pick a review.

Click on the covers or text links below to buy these books for gift-giving this holiday season or later. These books are perfectly fine gifts for others, or for yourself for that matter.

Geoff Shackelford returns to the coffee table golf book market with this fine collection of essays, intriguing sidebars, and beautiful artwork. Shackeford specializes in writing about golf course architecture, a subject near and dear to some of us. His work also has the benefit of being well written.

The essays argue for the continuation of time-honored principles to produce three fundamental elements to golf course design: naturalness, variety, and strategy.

Shackelford is not the type of critic who contends that nothing good was ever done since the 1920’s. He’s pleased to note and describe the contributions of brilliant new courses such as Sand Hills in Nebraska, the handiwork of Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore. He also knows how the limits of golf course finance can affect good design, but argues convincingly that paying attention to artistry will yield appropriate dividends.

Spread among Shackelford’s 10 essays and 14 small sidebar pieces by writers such as Bernard Darwin, Robert Hunter, and Daniel Wexler, are over 50 fine art renderings by Illustrator Michael Miller. Miller, the former Director of Golf at Riviera Country Club in Los Angeles, also collaborated with Shackelford on The Golden Age of Golf Design. He also did the cover painting for Shackelford’s Masters of the Links.

This book will stun readers with an interest in both historical research and golf.

David Joy performed a one-man show in 1990 on the life of Old Tom Morris, at the Byre Theatre in St. Andrews, Scotland.

As part of that well-received production, he used a scrapbook prop, in similar fashion as he imagined Morris would have used in recalling his many decades of golf at St. Andrews, Prestwick, and the other classic courses of Great Britain.

In preparing for the show, Joy contacted Peter Crabtree, a collector who had miraculously obtained a 29-sheet collection of Morris’s own newspaper clippings.

Based on that treasure trove and his other research for the theatrical production, Joy decided to build a more complete scrapbook, including artwork, photographs, Morris’s clips, and a host of other primary sources.

The book runs in chronological order, with "handwritten" notes liberally sprinkled throughout to add context and critical information to enable the reader to understand the materials.

It’s a remarkable achievement, similar to a well-researched museum retrospective on Morris’s life and times.

Dr. Alister MacKenzie is among golf’s most revered architects of the Golden Age, yet parts of his life remain a mystery. Few contemporaneous accounts give more than a partial glimpse of his entire personality. According to this well-researched biography, he was fond of reminding potential clients and others about his medical training, but his actual experience as a physician was surely nothing more than middling. He was justifiably proud of his expertise in the art of camouflage, but he had significant trouble gaining acceptance of his ideas during World War I, when it could have helped. While in America, MacKenzie acted like a classic Scotsman, but he was actually born in England, in Normanton, near Leeds.

Unlike many golf architects, he was by no means an accomplished golfer. MacKenzie knew his way around a putting green, however, and like many other architects, MacKenzie’s designs therefore tended to favor his area of playing expertise.

Doak is well-known to fans of golf architecture, because of his own design work and his previous forays into writing, including The Anatomy of a Golf Course. Scott, a retired Scottish physician, is less well-known, but did much of the research into MacKenzie’s life and times. In addition to this book, we also have Raymund Haddock, MacKenzie’s stepgrandson, to thank for finding the manuscript that became The Spirit of St. Andrews.

This coffee-table sized book includes an extensive collection of old photographs and drawings, full-color pictures of famous holes, and fascinating reproductions of MacKenzie’s correspondence.

One chapter provides short biographies of the many design collaborators with whom MacKenzie worked during his extensive career.

The last extended essay will provoke debate, because it describes MacKenzie’s best holes, at least from the authors’ perspectives.

Despite its outsized dimensions, this is not a coffee table book, in the traditional sense of a book long on pictures and short on text. To be sure, the photographs are stunning, but Klein’s way with words is equally impressive.

Brad Klein came to this massive biography/golf architecture study with the right credentials. He’s the founding editor of Golfweek’s Superintendent News, a design consultant, and a well-known golf writer.

His latest creation is an extensive study of one of golf’s most prolific course designers. As Klein notes, however, Ross’s record is not as extensive as some have claimed over the years. Even so, he managed to handle over 450 projects, and was directly responsible for at least 399 courses.

Using a wide range of original source material, combined with up-to-date aerial photography and other useful data, Klein set out to "place Ross’s life in the context of his own evolving design work." In addition, Klein shows how the intervention of club committees, insufficiently appreciative greens keepers, and others altered Ross’s original concepts, and usually not for the better.

The aerial photographs are particularly useful in supporting Klein’s interpretation. For example, the contemporaneous overhead shot of Skokie Country Club, host of the 1922 U.S. Open, shows a near-total absence of trees on the course. The aerial picture from 1997 shows how the area is now nearly overrun with forest. It’s just not what Ross intended. Klein notes that the course is currently undergoing a restoration, with over 400 trees already removed.

In Chapter 7, Klein also describes the basic elements that distinguish Ross’s work, such as efficient routings, generous fairways, and demanding iron play. On several occasions Klein demolishes the notion that Ross’s preferred green design was epitomized by the turtle-back greens at his beloved Pinehurst No. 2. Ample proof of Klein’s argument can be seen and played at nearby Mid-Pines, one of my favorite Pinehurst-area courses.

For fans of golf architecture in general and Donald Ross in particular, Klein has performed a valuable service.

This one is a rarity—a golf book written for small children. The cute, well-illustrated story is fairly simple. A spider, complete with argyle markings,   is taken from his home on a golf course to a nature center. He continues to play golf, and eventually involves all the other insects into first watching and then taking up the game themselves.

When the publishers sent this book to me, my first thought was that golfing grandparents would buy this book and keep it at their house, to entertain their grandchildren when they visited.

Michael Glenn Monroe, the illustrator, carried forward this intergenerational connection by dedicating the book to his grandfather, who taught him the game.

If you're looking for other golf books for the holidays, click on this image:

Amazon.com Message