Golf Ball

Object Lessons

by Harry J. Brown

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.


Harry Brown explores the composition, history, kinetic life, and the long deterioration of golf balls, which as it turns out may outlive their hitters by a thousand years, in places far beyond our reach. Golf balls embody our efforts to impose our will on the land, whether the local golf course or the Moon, but their unpredictable spin, bounce, and roll often defy our control. Despite their considerable technical refinements, golf balls reveal the futility of control. They inevitably disappear in plain sight and find their way into hazards. Golf balls play with people.


Harry Brown's short treatise on the golf ball serves up surprising lessons about the human desire to tame and control the landscape through technology.


Object Lesson is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Genres: Nonfiction

161 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2014

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the 33 1/3 series which delves into the minutia of a single album by a band expounded upon by articulate writers/fans, the Object Lessons series delves into everyday items with equally talented guides.

"...an exploded garden, holding our conciousness in a delicate, liminal state of pleasure between artificiality and wildness."

Harry Brown's poeticism drives (pun intended) this short musing on the golf ball. But it is so much more. I had moments where I put the book down and felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of golf balls in the world, the sheer number of golf courses: an area the size of Connecticut could be filled with the golf courses of America; an area the size of Massachusettes filled with all the golf courses of the world. And just think of the artificial golf-ball-mountain that could be erected from the billions of golf balls that have been made and have nowhere to go, that have been lost in the wildness of artificial greens. This book captured my imagination. It is pretty and well written and there is poetry. Plus Brown quotes a book that I am in the middle of reading "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experince" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
I'm reading Hotel by Joanna Walsh next.!

[Simone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yep, I'm making my way through as many of these little Object Lessons books that I can get my hands on. So I liked the history of golf section at the beginning (I was unaware of the history of golf) and then the middle sort of dragged, but right before the end he does a thing about golf balls and the moon that snuck up on me and took my breath away. It's so short that I think it's almost worth reading for the thing about the moon.

[Steven Beningo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent look at the history of a very common sporting object.