{"id":671,"date":"2018-12-31T13:20:23","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:20:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=671"},"modified":"2018-12-31T13:20:23","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T13:20:23","slug":"lone-star-book-reviews-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=671","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>BIOGRAPHY\/SPORTS<\/p>\n

Kevin Robbins<\/span><\/p>\n

Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-544-14849-9 (ebook also available), 348 pgs., $28.00<\/p>\n

April 5, 2016<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Si Dunn<\/p>\n

No matter where on Earth you play golf,<\/span> Harvey Penick likely has had influence on how you pursue the game.<\/p>\n

Nearly twenty-five years after its first publication, Harvey Penick\u2019s Little Red Book<\/span> remains the top-selling golf instruction book of all time. The New York Times<\/span> once hailed it as \u201cthe golfer\u2019s equivalent of The Elements of Style<\/span>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvey Morrison Penick<\/span> (1904\u20131995) spent most of his life close to home in Austin, at the Austin Country Club\u2019s golf course. He started out there in 1912 as a young caddy and worked his way up to being named the country club\u2019s head professional golfer in 1923, a position he would hold until he \u201cretired\u201d in 1971. Retirement meant staying on as \u201cprofessional emeritus\u201d and helping new and experienced golfers improve their play.<\/p>\n

Throughout his career, Austin author Kevin Robbins<\/span> explains, Penick had kept careful notes, recording his thoughts and observations on good and bad golf in a worn red Scribbletex notebook. \u201cHarvey knew what he knew,\u201d Robbins emphasizes, \u201cbecause he had seen it work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, for decades Penick used his experience and insights to help a wide array of golfers, from youngsters to top professionals and celebrity golfers. And this included women golfers at a time when many country club pros still refused to teach them. For a number of years, Penick also coached the University of Texas at Austin\u2019s golf team part-time, while remaining with the Austin Country Club. He played significant teaching roles in the careers of top American golfers such as Tom Kite, Ben Crenshaw, Betsy Rawls, Kathy Whitworth, and numerous others.<\/p>\n

Friends and family began telling him his accumulated notes should be put into a golf instruction book. Once he warmed to the notion, a series of events led him to a book contract and a fortuitous but unusual pairing. In 1991, Penick, a quiet, retiring, golf-focused gentleman, chose Edwin \u201cBud\u201d Shrake,<\/span> an Austin-based Sports Illustrated<\/span> writer and novelist, to co-author the Little Red Book.<\/span> Robbins writes that Shrake had an \u201cuncanny aptitude for balancing competent journalistic production with great personal excess,\u201d which had included alcohol and drugs. Shrake also was dating Texas governor Ann Richards.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 1992 first edition quickly became a best-seller. Indeed, Harvey Penick\u2019s Little Red Book<\/span> even influenced Penick\u2019s future biographer. Young Kevin Robbins\u2019 grandmother knew he loved golf and gave him a copy as a Christmas gift. Robbins later became a sportswriter who focused on golf and had a twenty-two-year career that included writing for the Austin American-Statesman,<\/span> the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/span>, and other publications. He is now a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin.<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvey\u2019s message of simplicity, honor and integrity,\u201d Robbins has stated elsewhere, \u201cappealed to me in a deep place; [his book] changed me, in ways that go well beyond golf.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if you have little interest in golf, this well-written Texas sports biography tracking Harvey Penick\u2019s life and career can entertain and inspire.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com BIOGRAPHY\/SPORTS Kevin Robbins Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Hardcover, 978-0-544-14849-9 (ebook also available), 348 pgs., $28.00 April 5, 2016 Reviewed by Si Dunn No matter where on Earth you play golf, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}