Stubborn and resourceful, he decides to carve his own course in the lush Dorset landscape. Local mischief and aristocratic competition almost do him in, but in the end, he triumphs to build his course, open it on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, and host American champion Bobby Jones.
The plot has a happy fairy-tale quality about it, but the details are grimly realistic. The English, despite their fine speech and refined manners, are brutal in their subtle forms of discrimination and exclusion. Natasha Solomons, who has based her novel on the experience of her grandparents, tells their story with humor and compassion.
THE SUBTLE BODY: The Story of Yoga in America
By Stefanie Syman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $28
“Yoga was nothing if not plastic: it was a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, and a route to God.” Yoga could be reduced to a health tonic or expanded to contain all our wishes and hopes; yoga could be a mere technique (a series of poses) or an antidote to the evils of modernity itself. Stefanie Syman traces the history of yoga in America from its beginnings in the 19th century with the New England transcendentalists, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau through its many incarnations in New York, Hollywood, Haight-Ashbury, and Woodstock.
Some forms of yoga emphasized the spiritual, promising that it led to spiritual awakening and released energy that allowed the initiate to see God. Some forms of yoga stressed the secular, promoting physical health, psychological well-being, sexual pleasure, and psychedelic joy.
