Golf Ball

by Harry Brown, Ian Bogost (Editor), Christopher Schaberg (Editor)

Overview

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 Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628921380
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/29/2015
Series:	Object Lessons
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.70(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Harry Brown is Associate Professor of English at DePauw University, USA. He is the author of Injun Joe's Ghost (University of Missouri, 2004) and Videogames and Education (M.E. Sharpe, 2008)

Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Director of Film & Media Studies, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game studio, and a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic. Bogost is author or co-author of ten books, including Alien Phenomenology (2012)and Play Anything (2016).

Christopher Schaberg is Director of the Program in Public Scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2012), The End of Airports (2015), Airportness (2017), The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth (2018), Searching for the Anthropocene (2019), Pedagogy of the Depressed (2021), and Adventure: An Argument for Limits (2023), all published by Bloomsbury. He is also the founding co-editor (with Ian Bogost) of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons book series.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Part One: Out: Thing
1. How I cut a golf ball in half, and found a lot of things inside
2. How the golf ball keeps holy the Lord's day
3. How an empire made the golf ball, and the golf ball made an empire
4. How the golf ball blew up America and made golf more fun
5. How the golf ball went ballistic
6. How the golf ball reached détente
7. How the court decided custody of the golf ball
8. How the golf ball became the #1 ball in golf
9. How the golf ball got so cool
Part Two: In: Phenomenon
10. How the golf ball vanishes before your eyes
11. How the golf ball makes us feel fulfilled, for a millisecond
12. How to control the unruly golf ball
13. How to hit the golf ball by not hitting it
14. How the golf ball looks into the abyss, and the abyss looks back
15. How the golf ball won the Golden Fleece
16. How the golf ball went to the moon
17. How the golf ball makes friends with animals
18. How the golf ball prepares for doomsday

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Golf Ball is a funny, smart, and charming meditation on an unlikely subject. Who knew that the story of this humble little white sphere could tell us so much about our history and culture? Brown weaves cultural history, literary criticism, physics, and philosophy into this wonderful book. His meditation on the golf ball deserves a place on the reading list of the curious golfer and cultural critic alike.” —Orin Starn, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, USA, and author of The Passion of Tiger Woods

“Brown starts where the curious amongst us always seem to-by taking things apart. Departing from the physical dissection of a single ball, performed as a boy, Brown rollicks through a detailed and highly entertaining exploration of the history of the game of golf. Golf Ball will fill the air of the 19th Hole with questions answered and stories told.” —Tom Chiarella, Visiting Writer, Esquire Magazine, and Award-Winning Member of the Golf Writers Association of America

“An intriguing mix of history, personal anecdote and cutting-edge philosophy, carrying the reader aloft over a range of courses and discourses past and present … In Golf Ball, Brown has some fun with contemporary thinking whilst never getting too bogged down in the sand trap of theory … leaving us with some intriguing questions to ponder about the objects we use, lose and overlook every day.” —Neil Fitzgerald, LapsedHermit.com

“Golf Ball… begins with Harry Brown explaining how his object chose him. As an eight-year-old homegrown Heideggerian of a boy, he claims, he sliced a golf ball in two to inquire into its hardness. The book derives from this severing. It inhabits the 'glimpse of internal structure' that it offered, unfolding in two parts: 'Out: Thing,' and 'In: Phenomenon.'” —Julian Yates, Los Angeles Review of Books

From the Publisher

Brown starts where the curious amongst us always seem to-by taking things apart. Departing from the physical dissection of a single ball, performed as a boy, Brown rollicks through a detailed and highly entertaining exploration of the history of the game of golf. Golf Ball will fill the air of the 19th Hole with questions answered and stories told.

Tom Chiarella

Golf Ball is a funny, smart, and charming meditation on an unlikely subject. Who knew that the story of this humble little white sphere could tell us so much about our history and culture? Brown weaves cultural history, literary criticism, physics, and philosophy into this wonderful book. His meditation on the golf ball deserves a place on the reading list of the curious golfer and cultural critic alike.

Orin Starn