7 books for golfers and fairway fans

6. “18 in America: A Young Golfer’s Epic Journey to Find the Essence of the Game”

By Dylan Dethier

Scribner

258 pages

(Before entering Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Dylan Dethier hit the road to play a round of golf in each of the lower 48 states.)

"They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet at Alder Creek [Golf Course in Boonville, N.Y.]. As I pulled in the driveway, I noted a dilapidated practice green a few yards off the road, its mini-flagsticks leaning one way or the other as if to mimic the schizophrenic grass on the putting surface itself. Hundreds of golf balls, some yellow and some an old, coffee-stained shade of white, lay abandoned on the ground of the too-short driving range, which looked as it it would serve as their final resting place. Wild grass had conquered two wheels and part of the front cage of the range picker and seemed determined to envelop it entirely." 

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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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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