Great book and very insightful information using golf as the vehicle for the explanations.

"You would get to love golf, and your life"

I have never played golf in my life, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. M. Scott Peck uses a full game of golf - to go with you to play the whole course - and shares reflection of how to live our lives. Amazing. Now I have learned so much about life, and for sure, golf.

Peck, best know for his book The Road Less Traveled, is a psychiatrist and author of 13 books. He makes it clear up front in this book that this is not a "how to play golf" book, but rather a how "not to play golf" book. He creates an imaginary golf course called Exotica and uses it to explain resemblance of the golf journey and life journey. There are a lot of funny stories, poignant stories, and very good lessons I can recommend this book for everyone - whether you play or not. I can also tell you that as a beginning golfer it's great to know so much of my game is "normal".

Having only read one other Peck book - The Road Less Traveled (which I thoroughly enjoyed and benefited from) - I can't yet call myself a die-hard fan of his work. Still, having enjoyed and appreciated this book just as much - a "how not-to" guide that likens the game of golf (hole by frustrating hole) to the spiritual journey of life - I'm inclined to believe that I might enjoy some - if not all - of his other books as well. Though a beginning golfer and a lifelong agnostic (closer to atheism than not), I still found so much to love and learn from in this book. Highly recommended to open-minded golfers and non-golfers alike!

The book had good points, but overall was slow and boring.

An insightful look at spirituality, and how you can find it in golf. A rather humorous look at golf and how spiritualamity can help you with the game. In the end, life us about spiritual growth.

The first half is really solid. The second half is very religious. At times, Peck tries to avoid preaching about religion, specifically Christianity, and does okay, but for the majority of the second half he focuses on spirituality as a link to God. Read the first half, take it in and put the book down.

Fabulous book on living a fulfilling life, using golf as a metaphor. Love Scott Peck's ideas and philosophy.

Having recently taken up golf, I was seeing spiritual lessons in the game. And so it was real neat to read Peck's book which is all about relating golf to the spiritual life. At time funny and other times deep, Peck's book is very interesting. It does lack real depth...he begins to scratch the surface of some profound spiritual truths, but they don't go as far as they seem they could go.

I don't know when you should rate a book five star. I read this books not from the golf perspective but that of spirituality. I read other books of same author on this topic, In other words I wanted to read more of this author work. That's why I could justify the five stars.

I will randomly through things that I learned after the first read of the book

This book includes good bit of Golf knowledge. The knowledge is build up on each chapter, with a good breather of comparison and reflection of real life. I newer know that golf has a complex and easy paradox nature. People think gold if hard but so is life.

When we learn something, don't expect that everything will be straight forward, a steady or linear learning curve. We will hit a wall, this is the time to perform kenosis, clear our egos, Forgive yourself, and don what's next. Like in the game of cricket if a player drops a catch. The quickly he forgets the better he will catch next ball.

There are some good parenting tips and in the end I would never found about the spiritual side of golf and how it connect to our real life if I didn't read this book.

I actually liked the first few chapters of this book, but like many golf courses where the holes all seem the same, I became bored after about the 8th hole.

This book did not particulary interest me. Many times I would find myself rather bored and tense while the author rambled on about how golf relates to life. As one could see, this could become rather repetetive. the Author developed his own 18 hole fictional course, where each hole described a different aspect of life. Only, somehow, he would start talking about his marriage, or how he served for America. Not only did this not relate to how Golf and the human spirit are related, but these digressions tended to not exactly be entertaining. Overall, I would not recommend this book, but keep in mind some advice may serve as helpful..