Rick Lipsey returned from a vacation with an unusual job offer. After playing a few rounds at Bhutan's Royal Thimphu Golf Club, one of the members asked if he'd consider becoming the kingdom's golf pro. "Sure, I'd love to move to Bhutan," Lipsey flippantly responded. Next thing you know, he, his wife, and their infant daughter are boarding a plane for this remote Himalayan country. With one foot in the ancient world and the other in the twenty-first century, Bhutan is working to successfully meld the old and the new, from subsistence farming and religious festivals to the Internet and World Wrestling Entertainment. In Golfing on the Roof of the World, Rick sets great golf travel writing against the bigger political story of Bhutan's entrance to the modern world. Not only does he teach and play golf in the shadow of the world's tallest peaks, but he also comes to understand the seismic shifts in store for the last Buddhist kingdom where peace and spiritual prosperity have abounded, and the national standard for measuring success is Gross National Happiness.

“Jealous. That’s what I am. Green with golf envy…Why didn’t we think of that? I mean, what golfer worth his, or her, balls wouldn’t want to trade all the troubles of life for the adventure and privilege of teeing it up everywhere from the glacial volcanoes of the Andes to the Arctic Circle in Norway?”--from the foreword by Turk Pipkin At 47, David Wood sold everything he owned and set out to fulfill every golfer’s dream: For one year, he traveled the world (covering 60,000 miles and every continent except Antartica) by plane, boat, train, motorcycle and rickshaw, to play the game he loves in the most exotic locales, including the world’s highest, driest, hottest, coldest, and most remote golf courses, and lived to tell the tale. Along the way, he met a bevy of fascinating characters, including surly cabbies, taxi drivers with a death wish, welcoming golf course managers, threatening kangaroos, and golf pros out for a quick game. David faced dire situations, such as bouts of food poisoning in India and Egypt, altitude sickness in Argentina, getting booted out of the Ukraine by armed guards, and muddling through with limited language skills, but through it all he maintained a sense of humor and of course his passion for golf, which he played every chance he got.

Orwell Brennan, Chief of Police in Dockerty, Newry County, can't resist digging into the death of a man found in a tree with two arrows in his stomach.

Alberta's iconic river has been dammed and plumbed, made to spin hydro-electric turbines, and used to cleanse Calgary. Artificial lakes in the mountains rearrange its flow; downstream weirs and ditches divert it to irrigate the parched prairie. Far from being wild, the Bow is now very much a human product: its fish are as manufactured as its altered flow, changed water quality, and newly stabilized and forested banks. The River Returns brings the story of the Bow River's transformation full circle through an exploration of the recent revolution in environmental thinking and regulation that has led to new limits on what might be done with and to the river. Rivers have been studied from many perspectives, but too often the relationship between nature and people, between rivers and the cultures that have grown up beside them, have been separated. The River Returns illuminates the ways in which humans, both inadvertently and consciously, have interacted with nature to make the Bow.

Think you know all about sport? Think again. The Rough Guide to Cult Sport takes the armchair sports fan on a beguiling world tour exploring the maverick, the bizarre and the deliriously obscure parts of the sporting universe. It recalls the players, games and moments in all sports which have excited the greatest passions from the dawn of the Olympics to the present day. You'll find sections on the top twenty cult sports from baseball to sumo, angling to ultimate frisbee; cult legends, from female grand prix driver Hell� Nice to Mexican wrestling star Mil M�scaras; around the world in 80 sports, from bog snorkelling, bun climbing and ostrich racing to pumpkin throwing; plus all the shocks, conspiracies and scandals that have rocked the world of sport over the years. With all this, plus the strangest sports statistics you'll ever find, The Rough Guide to Cult Sport is the ultimate tribute to the weird and wonderful world of sport.