The Bogey Man

Reviews / Votes

Humorous but also agonizing and also unfailingly fascinating regardless of one's interest in golf. For the psychology of the sport - and this is what Mr. Plimpton is probing - there is nothing more revealing around * New York Times * Plimpton will interest even the man who can't tell a pitching wedge from a putter... This is really a book about a kind of madness with rules, and anyone can appreciate the appeal of that * Newsweek * Golf is a lonely and private game, lacking the natural drama of football, but Plimpton, by subsituting improvisation for plot, has caught its mad comedy and bizarre effects on people in a book just as charming, in its own way, as Paper Lion * Life * With his gentle, ironic tone, and unwillingness to take himself too seriously, along with Roger Angell, John Updike and Norman Mailer he made writing about sports something that mattered * Guardian * What drives these books, and has made them so popular, is Plimpton's continuous bond-making with the reader and the comedy inherent in his predicament. He is the Everyman, earnests and frail, wandering in a world of supermen, beset by fears of catastrophic violence and public humiliation, yet gamely facing it all in order to survive and tell the tale... A prodigious linguistic ability is on display throughout, with a defining image often appended at the end of a sentence like a surprise dessert. -- Timothy O'Grady * Times Literary Supplement *