AND IF YOU PLAY GOLF, YOU'RE MY FRIEND

Follow-up to golf instructor Penick's megabestselling Harvey Penick's Little Red Book (1992—not reviewed), featuring further discrete nuggets of grandfatherly advice from the now-88-year-old author. Penick's vision is of the golf ball as fortune cookie: ``I have always tried to impress on my members and my pupils that the rules of golf are made to protect you, not for you to gain by them''; ``In the game of golf, the ball is played as you find it''; ``If you want to change yourself, you must change how you think.'' Little vignettes and anecdotes coat much of the wit and wisdom, which no doubt can go some way toward making one a better golfer, if not a better person. In general, though, this is mediocre sportswriting, saccharine and banal—but with golf lacking a Roger Angell or a Roger Kahn, it's about the best that golfers are being offered these days, which is one reason, no doubt, why it'll drive, not putt, onto the bestseller lists.