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Ancestral Links |
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| Book: Hardcover | 9.25 x 6.25in | 304 pages | ISBN 9780451225917 | 03 Mar 2009 | NAL | 18 - AND UP |
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One man’s quest to uncover the roots of his family’s obsession with golf—a journey that takes him to his ancestral home in Ireland, to Scotland, and to the American heartland.
View our feature on John Garrity’s Ancestral Links. John Garrity is well known in the golf world for his writing for Sports Illustrated, Golf Magazine, and on Golf.com. In this new book, Garrity travels to the remote corner of Ireland from which his great-grandfather left for America, now home to a majestic golf course. There he discovers why local farmers spent seven years carving the course out of unforgiving terrain, using only rakes and spades for their work. From there, he visits Musselburgh, Scotland, where his maternal ancestors played golf before the first thirteen rules of the game were written there in 1774, and to Wisconsin’s St. Croix River Valley, where his father learned the Ancient Game.
Part memoir, part travelogue, and all golf, this book is for the enthusiast, the casual fan, or just the curious. The story of how golf altered three small-town landscapes and forever changed one family will captivate readers and inspire them to find life’s greatest treasures in their own family tree.
View John Garrity's photos from his trip to retrace his roots in Ireland on Golf.com here.
“Poignant and revealing.”
—Booklist
“Garrity offers some wry insights into the sport of golf.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Lively, humorous, and informative…a deeply personal and soulful journey by…an exceptionally talented writer.”
—Michigan Golfer
"Garrity's odyssey is green, Irish, wry, wistful and inspiring. His book is a jig in a bunker surrounded by a field of dreams. It's magical."
— Michael Bamberger, author of To the Linksland
“Part family memoir, part travelogue, Garrity offers some wry insights into the sport of golf and the often profound reasons why hitting a small ball into a hole means so much to so many people— and why they would travel to the ends of the earth (or at least to Scotland and Ireland) just to have the honor and pleasure of doing so.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Sports Illustrated senior writer John Garrity retraced his roots the old-fashioned way: by poring over documents, hunting down distant relatives and playing some of the British Isles’ finest courses. Who said you can’t mix family business with pleasure?”
—Golf Magazine
“[Garrity] is a formidable talent… After all, this is a man who, in an erstwhile SI series called ‘Mats Only,’ found entertaining things to write about his compulsion for beating balls at practice ranges. In Ancestral Links, his themes—particularly a messy family lineage and mortality—are far weightier. Garrity is more than capable of carrying that load.”
—Golfweek Magazine
“[Ancestral Links is] part memoir—the recollections of both his father and brother, both recently dead of cancer, are poignant and revealing—part golfer’s travelogue, and part search for roots…Garrity’s humility and ingratiating style softens the inevitable envy problem (Why him and not me?) that often makes reading golf travelogues a mixed blessing.”
— Booklist
“I was enthralled by this fine book… Garrity has written a heartfelt elegy to his parents and brother framing his emotions and reflections amid the rugged and inspiring links of Carne. A sense of loss shadows the book but also self-discovery, hope and redemptive love… There’s much to relish in this book and you don’t have to have played Carne or Irish links or even been to Ireland to appreciate it… Garrity has taken it all in and the reader goes along for a wonderful, insightful ride.”
—Terry Moore, Michigan Golfer
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