Recommended Reading

Bulfinch Press, 128 pages, $29.95

Lindsay's howlingly hysterical photographs of the horrible things we do to golf balls--and they to us--put the tragedy and comedy of the game into focus. An intro by John Updike adds welcome perspective.

WHEN WAR PLAYED THROUGH

by John Strege

Gotham Books, 326 pages, $27.50

Put Allied golfers in a German POW camp and what do they do? Build a course and a club of their own. Strege's fascinating history of golf during World War II and the ends that duffers went to on all fronts to keep swinging makes for a chronicle worth surrendering to.

GOLF'S GOLDEN AGE: ROBERT T. JONES JR. AND THE LEGENDARY PLAYERS OF THE '10S, '20S, AND '30S

by Rand Jerris, with photographs by George S. Pietzcker

National Geographic, 160 pages, $27

They had faces then, and nobody froze them more compellingly than "Photo" Pietzcker. His artful character studies in sepia--including Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen and Francis Ouimet--are as visually alluring as the game itself.