Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime was toppled by a brutal coup in the wake of a famine in the early 1970s, providing the setting for Maaza Mengiste’s novel, “Beneath the Lion’s Gaze.” Seen through the eyes of a prominent, Western-trained physician and his family, Ethiopia’s descent into an authoritarian nightmare is narrated with a […]
Tiger’s Mea Culpa: The Descent from Olympus
I was in Milan for a tourism conference when Tiger delivered his mea culpa. I didn’t see it live, but I watched what I could bear of it when it was shown on Italian TV, with simultaneous translation turning Tiger’s stilted recitation into a lilting monologue. Later yet, on CNN, the only English-language channel available […]
Chairman Mao, May I Introduce Tom Morris?
While American real estate developers hunker down and try to figure out when if ever their forlorn industry will revive, the Chinese real estate market is booming, fueled in part by high-end golf communities that celebrate a luxurious life style. China’s transformation from a predominately rural society with a command economy dominated by state-run heavy […]
Golf Tourism in Italy
In mid-January of 2010, a group of experts on various components of golf development gathered in Rome to discuss the steps required to devise an effective Italian golf tourism strategy, with particular emphasis on how to attract more foreign visitors to the southernmost parts of the region known as the Mezzogiorno. Historically the poorest part […]
Golf Italian Style
In Italy it’s the art of living, rather than making a living, that matters. On one of my first visits to Italy many years ago, before I could understand any Italian, I was served lunch with a group mainly of Romans at a splendid villa on the outskirts of the city. Like educated people around […]
Review of Summertime, by J. M. Coetzee
The narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, “Summertime,” identified only as a “Mr Vincent,” is an English academic gathering information for a biographical study of a key period in the life of “John Coetzee,” the “late” South African writer. The novel’s opening is framed by “fragments” from “John Coetzee’s notebooks for the years […]