A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Paperback - 2003

From the publisher

North of Inverness, the "Northernmost outpost of civilization in Scotland, " on almost the same latitude as Juno, Alaska, lies the town of Dornoch, Scotland. This tiny village boasts a four-hundred-year history of the game of golf and has an influence that reaches to renowned courses of the United States. Lorne Rubenstein, a golf journalist, traveled to Dornach to renew his love of the game, but finds much more -- a rough-hewn countryside with inhabitants to match, and a place that reflects the spirit of the game it helped to create.

Rubenstein decided to spend a summer in Dornoch to clear the muddle from his golfing mind, but in the Highlands he found more than bracing air and challenging greens. He discovered a people shaped by the hardness of the land and the difficulty of earning a living from it, and still haunted by a historic wrong inflicted on their ancestors nearly two centuries before. A Season in Dornoch is a portrait of these villagers, their thoughtfulness and spirit, and their eagerness to share their world views, their life stories, and a wee dram or two. Rubenstein transports readers to this empty rugged landscape inhabited by colorful local characters, including a bartender who wears a kilt and recites poetry, who are as thorny and quarrelsome as the game they brought into the world.

A Season in Dornoch is both the story of one man's immersion in the game of golf and an exploration of the world from which it emerged. Like Peter Mayle's Season in Provence, it is at once a travelogue, an elegant portrait, and a marvelous journey to a mystical place.