A caddie since he was twelve and a golfer sporting a 1.8 handicap, Ollie decides to spend his gap year, pre Harvard, in St. Andrews: a town with the U.K.'s highest number of pubs per capita and home to the Old Course, golf's most famous eighteen holes, where he enrolls in the St. Andrews Links Trust caddie trainee program. Initially, the notoriously brusque veteran caddies treat Ollie like a pest. But after a year of waking up at 4:30 A.M. every morning and looping two rounds a day, Ollie earns their grudging respect. A charming coming-of-age memoir.

It was the longest of long-shots, the ultimate risk-reward play. Told with award-winning photography and extensive interviews with all the key players, America's St. Andrews is a book that captures the dramatic and colorful backstory of how Chambers Bay, a newly-opened and untested publicly-owned facility on the shores of Puget Sound, was selected as the site of the first U.S. Open ever to be held in the Pacific Northwest.

In this inspiring novel, one ordinary man makes the pilgrimage to the mythical greens of St. Andrews—the birthplace of golf—on a search for greatness. If golf novels had a leaderboard, Miracle at St. Andrews would be at the top. Though nobody has ever identified a single secret—no universally accepted truth—to the sport, every real player searches for one. Travis McKinley is one such seeker. A former professional golfer who feels like he's an amateur at the rest of life, he makes a pilgrimage to the mythical greens at St. Andrews. On the course where golf was born, every link, hole, fairway—even the gorse—feels like sacred ground. Ground that can help an ordinary player, an ordinary man, achieve a higher plane.

Read about what happens when golf writer Peper buys a house alongside the venerable Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Alister MacKenzie was one of golf's greatest architects. He designed his courses so that players of all skill levels could enjoy the game while still creating fantastic challenges for the most experienced players. Several of MacKenzie's courses, such as Augusta National, Cypress Point, and Pasatiempo, remain in the top 100 today. In his "lost" 1933 manuscript, published for the first time in 1995 and now finally available in paperback, MacKenzie leads you through the evolution of golf--from St. Andrews to the modern-day golf course--and shares his insight on great golf holes, the swing, technology and equipment, putting tips, the USGA, the Royal & Ancient, and more. With fascinating stories about Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, and many others, The Spirit of St. Andrews gives valuable lessons for all golfers as well as an intimate portrait of Alister MacKenzie, a true legend of the game.

"Food historian Andrew F. Smith presents the turkey in ten courses, beginning with the bird itself (actually, several species of it) in the wild. The Turkey subsequently includes discussions of practically every aspect of the icon, including its arrival in early America, how it came to be called "turkey," its domestication and mating habits, the expansion of the bird's territory into Europe, conditions in modern turkey processing plants, and the surprising boom-or-bust cycles in turkey husbandry. The bird's ascension to holiday mainstay - and the techniques of stuffing - are also discussed." "As one of the easiest foods to cook, the turkey's culinary possibilities have been widely explored if little noted. The second half of this book is a collection of more than a hundred historical and modern turkey recipes from across America and Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

The Old Course at St. Andrews is to golfers what St. Peter's is to Catholics or the Western Wall is to Jews: hallowed ground, the course every golfer longs to play -- and master. In 1983 George Peper was playing the Old Course when he hit a slice so hideous that he never found the ball. But in looking for it, he came across a For Sale sign on a stone town house alongside the famed eighteenth hole. Two months later he and his wife, Libby, became the proud owners of 9A Gibson Place. In 2003 Peper retired after twenty-five years as the editor in chief of Golf magazine. With the younger of their two sons off to college, the Pepers decided to sell their house in the United States and relocate temporarily to the town house in St. Andrews. And so they left for the land of golf -- and single malt scotch, haggis, bagpipes, television licenses, and accents thicker than a North Sea fog. While Libby struggled with renovating an apartment that for years had been rented to students at the local university, George began his quest to break par on the Old Course. Their new neighbors were friendly, helpful, charmingly eccentric, and always serious about golf. In no time George was welcomed into the local golf crowd, joining the likes of Gordon Murray, the man who knows everyone; Sir Michael Bonallack, Britain's premier amateur golfer of the last century; and Wee Raymond Gatherum, a magnificent shotmaker whose diminutive stature belies his skills. For anyone who has ever dreamed of playing the Old Course -- and what golfer hasn't? -- this book is the next best thing. And for those who have had that privilege, Two Years in St. Andrews will revive old memories and confirm Bobby Jones's tribute, "If I were to set down to play on one golf course for the remainder of my life, I should choose the Old Course at St. Andrews."

A critical assessment of America's foreign policy in the Middle East throughout the past four decades evaluates and connects regional engagements since 1990 while revealing their massive costs.

America&’s Longest Run: A History of the Walnut Street Theatre traces the history of America&’s oldest theater. The Philadelphia landmark has been at or near the center of theatrical activity since it opened, as a circus, on February 2, 1809. This book documents the players and productions that appeared at this venerable house and the challenges the Walnut has faced from economic crises, changing tastes, technological advances, and competition from new media. The Walnut&’s history is a classic American success story. Built in the early years of the nineteenth century, the Walnut responded to the ever-changing tastes and desires of the theatergoing public. Originally operated as a stock company, the Walnut has offered up every conceivable form of entertainment&—pageantry and spectacle, opera, melodrama, musical theater, and Shakespeare. It escaped the wrecking ball during the Depression by operating as a burlesque house, a combination film and vaudeville house, and a Yiddish theater, before becoming the Philadelphia headquarters for the Federal Theatre Project. Because Philadelphia is located so close to New York City, the Walnut has served as a tryout house for many Broadway-bound shows, including A Streetcar Named Desire, The Diary of Anne Frank, and A Raisin in the Sun. Today, the Walnut operates as a nonprofit performing arts center. It is one of the most successful producing theaters in the country, with more than 350,000 attending performances each year.

Questioning popular belief, a historian and re-examines what exactly led to the British Empire’s loss of the American Revolution. The loss of America was an unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders in Britain must have been to blame, but were they? This intriguing book makes a different argument. Weaving together the personal stories of ten prominent men who directed the British dimension of the war, historian Andrew O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory. In interlinked biographical chapters, the author follows the course of the war from the perspectives of King George III, Prime Minister Lord North, military leaders including General Burgoyne, the Earl of Sandwich, and others who, for the most part, led ably and even brilliantly. Victories were frequent, and in fact the British conquered every American city at some stage of the Revolutionary War. Yet roiling political complexities at home, combined with the fervency of the fighting Americans, proved fatal to the British war effort. The book concludes with a penetrating assessment of the years after Yorktown, when the British achieved victories against the French and Spanish, thereby keeping intact what remained of the British Empire. “A remarkable book about an important but curiously underappreciated subject: the British side of the American Revolution. With meticulous scholarship and an eloquent writing style, O'Shaughnessy gives us a fresh and compelling view of a critical aspect of the struggle that changed the world.”—Jon Meacham, author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power