Golfing on the Roof of the World
In Pursuit of Gross National Happiness
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Descripción editorial
Rick Lipsey returned from a vacation with an unusual job offer. After playing a few rounds at Bhutan's Royal Thimphu Golf Club, one of the members asked if he'd consider becoming the kingdom's golf pro. "Sure, I'd love to move to Bhutan," Lipsey flippantly responded. Next thing you know, he, his wife, and their infant daughter are boarding a plane for this remote Himalayan country. With one foot in the ancient world and the other in the twenty-first century, Bhutan is working to successfully meld the old and the new, from subsistence farming and religious festivals to the Internet and World Wrestling Entertainment. In Golfing on the Roof of the World, Rick sets great golf travel writing against the bigger political story of Bhutan's entrance to the modern world. Not only does he teach and play golf in the shadow of the world's tallest peaks, but he also comes to understand the seismic shifts in store for the last Buddhist kingdom where peace and spiritual prosperity have abounded, and the national standard for measuring success is Gross National Happiness.
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Lipsey, a Sports Illustrated reporter and coauthor of In Every Kid There Lurks a Tiger, knows the Zen-like secret to the success of every good golf book: keep golf out of it. Thusly, the great pleasures residing within this joyful work come not from any great insight into the nuances of the sport itself (although he does write on golf with fluidity and vision) but from its setting and the relationships detailed therein. A vacation in Bhutan resulted in a fascinating job offer: to be the golf pro at the country's Royal Thimphu Golf Club for three months. Lipsey (with wife and infant) end up in one of the world's most unusual places: a Buddhist kingdom on the roof of the world where mountaineering is banned and the king has established a policy of "Gross National Happiness," in part to save his people from the steadily approaching tides of modernization. Granted, Lipsey's time in Bhutan is spent in high style (working at the royal golf course and being treated as a minor celebrity), but if his loving descriptions of the generous people and gorgeous landscapes are only exaggerated by half, he still does the country proud. As for golf, Lipsey is enough of a realist to remember that it can be reduced to "underpaid and overworked people sweating bullets day by day so that wealthy men can have emerald green manicured oases on which they whack little white balls into holes."
