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Review of Feinstein's new book, "Open"
John_Conley:
I love Feinstein's books, so I'm sure I'll read it. His best in my opinion is Last Amateurs. Anyway, "turnabout is fair play", so can we expect a Feinstein review of Rough Meditations sometime soon? ;)
Two-Ball:
If one reviewer found all those mistakes in one read how can you trust anything Feinstein states as fact? You can't. How can you assume he gets the big stuff right when the small stuff is wrong?
Carlyle Rood:
None of the cited errors materially changes the story.
Dan Kelly:
--- Quote ---How can you assume he gets the big stuff right when the small stuff is wrong?
--- End quote ---
Here's my advice:
Don't "assume" that any writer ever gets the big stuff right.
Some do most of the time. Some do some of the time. Some do none of the time.
Some are smarter than others. Some are more careful than others.
Make your own judgments.
Over time, writers tend to reveal themselves -- as smart or not, careful or not.
I'm more or less with Brad Klein (and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) on this one: "God is in the details." I find it very disturbing -- but not at all surprising, based on my experience with publishing-house so-called "editors" -- when I find a bunch of small errors in a book.
Even if Feinstein gets all of the big stuff right (and I haven't read the book, so I don't know -- and I'm not sure I'd know even if I did read it!), and even if none of the plethora of little errors changes the story "materially," the little errors are legitimately criticized, because they tend to undermine the whole effort ... the same way one bad hole, or a couple of Stupid Trees, or a few misplaced bunkers undermine an otherwise-admirable golf course.
Luckily for Feinstein, his errors are more easily (and much less expensively!) remedied than those of a golf-course architect.
It'll be interesting to see if the next printing, or the paperback edition, contains the same mistakes.
Jeff Goldman:
I agree with Robert Walker about Feinstein's portraits of golfers in both A Good Walk Spoiled and The Majors. They are monotonous applications of "The Whig Interpretation of History" i.e., everyone (except John Daly) is decent, honorable, reaching high, overcoming life's challenges, advancing foward........and totally blah.
The interesting parts of his books are the "inside baseball," and it appears from Mr. Klein's review that it may be worth reading for that, albeit with grains of salt. (is this a record for mixed metaphors?)
Jeff Goldman
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