No. 1
The 19th Hole: Architecture of the Golf Clubhouse
by Richard Diedrich
(The Images Publishing Group, $75)
Finally, a coffee-table book that shifts focus off the course and into the sanctums: the locker rooms, libraries, grill rooms and parlors of some of the game's most storied American edifices (Augusta National, Winged Foot, Maidstone, Merion, Shinnecock Hills and Sleepy Hollow) and an intriguing mix of more recent vintage (the Bridge, Atlantic, Nantucket and Sherwood). The photography is spellbinding, the text smart if minimal, and the overall aura unmistakable: If you can't join 'em, you can look at 'em.
No. 2
Golf: The Marvelous Mania
by Alistair Cooke
(Arcade Publishing, $24.99)
The longtime host of Masterpiece Theatre was a self-confessed golf nut with a prose style blessedly smoother than his swing. This posthumous compilation embarks on an elegant and breezy Cooke's tour of the game that makes a compelling observation — "They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why" — before advancing across a swath wide enough to welcome bad weather and bad manners, Jones and Jack, the Masters and the Soviet Union along with Cooke's own two-step with triumph and humiliation.
No. 3
The Mysterious Montague: A True Tale of Hollywood, Golf and Armed Robbery
by Leigh Montville
(Doubleday, $26)
The facts support the subtitle, and the subtitle is irresistible, as is Montville's resurrection of golf's most eccentric and enigmatic footnotes from the '30s, starring John Montague, a.k.a. LaVerne Moore, with a stellar supporting cast that includes Bing Crosby, Oliver Hardy, Humphrey Bogart and W.C. Fields.
No. 4
Arnie & Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus and Golf's Greatest Rivalry
by Ian O'Connor
(Houghton Mifflin, $26)
What a setup: One is the game's greatest, the other its most beloved, and each yearns for the quality the other has long embodied. There has always been some Shakespeare in the on- and off-course clash of the King and the Bear, and O'Connor infuses their complex history with real context.
