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Hit 7 - The Downhill Lie (Vintage)
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Not yet published
Manufacturer: Vintage
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 796
EAN: 9780307280459
ISBN: 0307280454
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2009-05-19
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2009-05-19
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Reviews:
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Bestselling author Carl Hiaasen gives us a hilarious and compelling account of his return to the fairways after a thirty-twoyear absence. Carl Hiaasen wisely quit golfing in 1973. But some ambitions refuse to die, and as the years passed and the memories of slices and hooks faded, it dawned on Carl that there might be one thing in life he could do better in middle age than he could as a youth. So gradually he ventured back to the rolling, frustrating green hills of the golf course, where Carl ultimately—and foolishly—agrees to compete in a country-club tournament against players who can actually hit the ball. Hiaasen’s chronicle of his return to this bedeviling pastime will have you rolling with laughter.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very witty
Comment: Fun for a golfer with a sense of humor, but you don't have to golf to enjoy.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Library Book?
Comment: From your description, I knew I was purchasing a used book, however, it was never made clear the book originally was a library book. With St Louis library stamped all over it, the book (only 6 months since publishing)looks like it was stolen.
Customer Rating:
Summary: It Stinks
Comment: I've read every book of Hiaasen's fiction. While he's not the best writer, his stories are entertaining enough. Well, honestly, they have the potential to be good if they weren't all about the environment. His stories are very didactic. At times I feel like I'm reading a manifesto. I'm all about the environment, but seriously, Carl, you are a bit of a broken record.
Having said that I ordered this book expecting it to be fiction. I detest golf and figured it was going to be a story about how awful golf courses are for the environment. No, instead, it's a an incredibly boring book about his experiences golfing. I couldn't read more than a dozen pages. It is excruciatingly dull.
However, I am surprised that someone so gung-ho about the environment would be so into golf, considering the negative impact of golf courses on the environment. The pesticides and fertilizers they use run right into the water sources (about 4 tons of poison per year for an 18 hole course), contaminating them. Not to mention the sheer amount of fresh water that is wasted on keeping the vast acres in perfect shape. The land they use is an incredible waste. They rip down all of the trees, which multiplies the problem with water pollution, destroy the wetlands and waste all of that fresh water so that a few over-privileged people can play a game. They should use that land to build some housing for the 2 million or so people that are homeless in America.
Sorry, Carl, I have to say that this book has shown me that you are a bit of a hypocrite, and I won't be continuing to buy or read any more of your books.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Golf Books Are Like Putts...
Comment: ...The shorter, the better. So says Carl Hiaasen, who has had a lot of success as a novelist, but as he makes clear, his golf skills are nothing to brag about. THE DOWNHILL LIE is a relatively short book; it's an account of his return to golf after having abandoned the sport for three decades. There is a lot that is laugh-out-loud funny in this book, including an incident when his cart rolls into a pond.
Mr. Hiaasen's ambivalence is something every hacker knows, and he articulates why we all keep playing golf in spite of its many frustrations: "It surrenders just enough good shots to let you talk yourself out of quitting."
He describes his bad shots in hilarious detail, as well as his quest to find clubs that make up for his lousy swing. In short, we've all been there, done that -- but Carl Hiaasen makes golf's most maddening moments an enjoyable read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hysterical, whether or not you're a golfer...
Comment: If you are looking for a great Christmas present for the golfers on your list, The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport by Carl Hiaasen is the perfect gift. Hiaasen takes the same skills he uses to write his zany mysteries to produce this hysterical look at his return to golfing after a 30-year hiatus.
Carl Hiaasen's dad was a fairly good golfer, and he taught the sport to his son. But unlike dad, Carl was pretty much a duffer. "At my best, I'd shown occasional flashes of competence. At my worst, I'd been a menace to all carbon-based life-forms on the golf course." As a young adult, he decided to stop torturing himself and gave up playing. But 32 years later, his friends convince him to pick up some clubs and start playing again. Hiaasen also has a secret desire to become a better golfer in his 50s than he was in his youth. He decides to keep a journal along the way. What results is a truly funny look at not just golf, but getting older and our physical shortcomings.
Hiaasen takes lessons and then takes more lessons. He starts with a used set of clubs, and then purchases new ones. He also keeps buying putters and drivers. When one starts failing him, he ditches the offender in his locker and gets something new. He has a Ping putter that "has so many peculiar curves and sharp angles that it's impossible to get it clean with a golf towel. I need to take the blasted thing to a car wash and have it detailed." The author also purchases almost every item offered to help golfers improve their game (none of them work) and reads dozens and dozens of golf magazines and books (they don't help much, either).
Hiaasen's golf swing is entertaining by itself. He calls himself "a male Sybil in spikes" and compares his swing to an "ax murderer." But there is so much more to laugh at. At one course, he manages to sink his golf cart (he claims the brakes were faulty). At home, he uses one of his clubs to kill rats. And when his wife decides to take lessons, she wants to wear flip-flips so that she doesn't get a tan line on her ankles. The Downhill Lie really had me chuckling. When he finds out that Donald Trump can drive a golf ball 310 yards, Hiaasen comforted himself "with a petty vision of the cocksure billionaire trying to tee off in 25-knot gusts, his famously surreal hair torqued into cotton candy."
There is also a little of the environmental activist that we see in his mysteries. "Golf was not meant to be played in the shadow of a high-rise; that high rises don't belong on the banks of an estuary; and that whoever is responsible for such abominations should be pounded to a permanently infertile condition with a 60-degree lob wedge."
Whether or not you play golf, The Downhill Lie is a fun read--especially if you are a Hiaasen fan.
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