Fairway to Hell: Around the World in 18 Holes

There's a moment in every golfer's life that we remember forever. It belongs to that period after a perfect swing, when the sweet spot of the driver has met the ball with a thick, solid click. The ball screams off the tee on a low, rising climb, and just in the last quarter of its flight when you think it might start falling, the spin you've put on it bites into the air and the ball lifts, climbing more steeply and slowly in a last flare of energy. And then you get the moment, when the flight of the ball connects with the feeling of the strike and the two have travelled up the club, through your arms and shoulders and into your heart. I got much the same feeling after finishing this funny, funny book.

The thing about this golf memoir is that you don't even have to like the game to enjoy it. You certainly don't have to understand it. Lidz' golfing descriptions of duffers on the tee fussing about like a hen scratching gravel, or teasing the ball like a cat investigating a tortoise speak eloquently enough of character to enchant anybody. I can't state with confidence the function of a spoon or a brassie, but the point is that the vocabulary of the links fits the author's style like the paper on the wall, particularly in the chapter on a tournament in a nudist colony: "Nudists mostly avoid risque repartee. But pack 30 of them on a tight course, and the ricocheting double entendres are inescapable. "It's long, real long." "It's not that long, is it?" "Believe me, it's long." "Did you stay up, Sam? Please tell me you stayed up." "Yeah, I'm up." "Pam, can you loosen up on your grip?" "Stroke it a little more gently, Al." "He jumps on Len's misses every chance he gets." "By golly, what I wouldn't give for another three inches." "If you'd been straight, Sam, that puppy would have gone in."

Take the most difficult, annoying and addictive game ever invented and one of our wittiest writers at the peak of his powers and you have the funniest golf stories it will ever be your good fortune to read. My personal favorites are the author's encounter with a burrowing botfly on a golf course in Panama and his e-mail exchange with a Nigerian scam artist about bank accounts and rocket golf carts. All I can say is that like for many of the very best things in life, I almost envy those who have never experienced Mr. Lidz for the pleasure they have ahead. I am a relatively old hand, so for me his writing is like womb music - no matter how bad things get I can always take pleasure and relaxation from the style, the charm and the great good humor. This book penetrates the human condition in a way that simply makes me feel better.

This is surely one of the great golf books. Every page is bursting with gentle witticisms and laugh-out-loud humor. If you haven't read the memoir Unstrung Heroes or Lidz's other book, Ghosty Men, the chances are that for some rogue reason, you have been unaccountably denied. The chapter on the tournament at a Florida nudist colony is worth the cover price alone. Add to that the adventures with Bill Murray, the blotto heavy metal band Judas Priest, the New England farmer who raises llamas as caddies, the Zambia course at which 15 holes are guarded by live crocodiles, and the Fattie Open - where you're penalized if you weigh under 250 pounds - and you've more than made your money back. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Franz Lidz has taken such mundane material and made of it a picaresque adventure so warm, so likable, and so disarmingly funny.