cover image 112 Miles to the Pin: Extreme Golf Around the World

112 Miles to the Pin: Extreme Golf Around the World

Duncan Lennard. Skyhorse Publishing, $17.95 (201pp) ISBN 978-1-60239-174-1

Escorting the reader through uncharted territory, journalist and author Lennard playfully describes the adventurous side of golf, hoping that fellow golfers will rediscover the joy of a game that ""remains dominated by social convention... marginalizing the people who have the most fire for it."" As such, he's amassed infectious, inspiring interviews with unorthodox golfers from every continent: cross-country golfer David Ewen improved his game by playing all the way across his homeland of Scotland; the Natural Born Golfers, a group of raffishly dressed German punks, swing at targets from rooftops or boats; and New Zealand's Mackenzie Muster naturist festival features a nude tournament (though socks and shoes are allowed). Lennard rounds out his global survey with an amusing appendix of miscellany: records of the longest hits from land, ocean, and space; tips for tundra and mountain golf; and rules for playing the city (""from the Shoreditch Urban Open Rulebook""). Though Lennard's descriptions are deft, readers will long for a photo to illustrate rare hazards like the aftermath of warring hippos or the Arctic skuas, large and aggressive birds who steal balls, mistaking them for penguin eggs; for those and other images, readers will have to turn to Lennard's 2004 book, Extreme Golf, for which this makes a fun, fitting follow-up.