Tuesday
May122009
A Son Of The Game
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 01:34AM
The latest effort from James Dodson, A Son of the Game: A Story of Golf, Going Home, and Sharing Life's Lessons
, takes us to the Sandhills of North Carolina for another chapter in a uniquely Southern life. Raised in Greensboro and educated in Chapel Hill, Dodson has lived the live of a newspaperman and has written for dailies from Georgia to Maine. However, in Son it becomes clear that every stop along the way was merely a detour on an Odyssean journey back to the Old North State.
The joy in a James Dodson book comes from his engaging style and his openness. He invites us into his family, both actual and extended, then seemingly hides nothing from us. We've met most of the characters before, from wife Wendy to son Jack to Arnold Palmer, and we see how they have grown and how they continue to tutor our hero. Through it all, though, is Jim. Part sage, part buffoon, part knight errant, and part Barney Fife with a good thesaurus, he deals with crisis after crisis with an open mind and an open heart. Aid comes to him from every quarter, from family and old friends and complete strangers, and through them we see how a community can sustain a man and how a man can sustain a community.
Like his weekly column for the Southern Pines Pilot newspaper, the best of which are laugh-out-loud funny while also heartstoppingly tender, Dodson here shows us that small-town America, its values intact, does still exist. If we are smart enough and lucky enough, we might be able to rediscover it too.
, takes us to the Sandhills of North Carolina for another chapter in a uniquely Southern life. Raised in Greensboro and educated in Chapel Hill, Dodson has lived the live of a newspaperman and has written for dailies from Georgia to Maine. However, in Son it becomes clear that every stop along the way was merely a detour on an Odyssean journey back to the Old North State.The joy in a James Dodson book comes from his engaging style and his openness. He invites us into his family, both actual and extended, then seemingly hides nothing from us. We've met most of the characters before, from wife Wendy to son Jack to Arnold Palmer, and we see how they have grown and how they continue to tutor our hero. Through it all, though, is Jim. Part sage, part buffoon, part knight errant, and part Barney Fife with a good thesaurus, he deals with crisis after crisis with an open mind and an open heart. Aid comes to him from every quarter, from family and old friends and complete strangers, and through them we see how a community can sustain a man and how a man can sustain a community.
Like his weekly column for the Southern Pines Pilot newspaper, the best of which are laugh-out-loud funny while also heartstoppingly tender, Dodson here shows us that small-town America, its values intact, does still exist. If we are smart enough and lucky enough, we might be able to rediscover it too.
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