What makes playing a golf course a great experience? Kevin Markham travelled 6,800 miles in a 20-year-old camper van, walked 2,100 miles, lost countless balls, and wore out three pairs of golf shoes to find out. He played and rated every 18-hole course - all 350 of them. The result is the most comprehensive, best-researched guide to Irish golfs, from expensive, well-known courses to affordable little gems. Kevin assesses each course in a detailed review and from a novel perspective, rating the golfing experience using the same criteria for all courses. Courses are ranked out of 100, across 8 criteria, such as design, appeal and value for money. This concise, detailed book is for golfing tourists looking for great value courses; for golfing societies that want to go beyond their local area; and for Irish golfers searching for excellent but unsung courses in Ireland. Written from an amateur's perspective, reviews focus on the energy and excitement of playing each course to give a true representation of the golf experience, and provides all the information necessary to book your round.

The hysterical story bestseller about one man's epic Celtic sojourn in search of ancestors, nostalgia, and the world's greatest round of golf By turns hilarious and poetic, A Course Called Ireland is a magnificent tour of a vibrant land and paean to the world's greatest game in the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. In his thirties, married, and staring down impending fatherhood, Tom Coyne was familiar with the last refuge of the adult male: the golfing trip. Intent on designing a golf trip to end all others, Coyne looked to Ireland, the place where his father has taught him to love the game years before. As he studied a map of the island and plotted his itinerary, it dawn on Coyne that Ireland was ringed with golf holes. The country began to look like one giant round of golf, so Coyne packed up his clubs and set off to play all of it-on foot. A Course Called Ireland is the story of a walking-averse golfer who treks his way around an entire country, spending sixteen weeks playing every seaside hole in Ireland. Along the way, he searches out his family's roots, discovers that a once-poor country has been transformed by an economic boom, and finds that the only thing tougher to escape than Irish sand traps are Irish pubs.

Mark Twain had it all wrong: golf is not a good walk spoiled, golf is a journey. And when Ireland provides the map it becomes an 11,000km odyssey for one man in a camper van. Kevin plays every 18-hole golf course in Ireland in all kinds of weather and with all kinds of golfers. He deals with a leaky roof, potholes, born-again Christians and even an Irish mammy. Ireland's beauty shines through but the people encountered along the way, the golf clubs visited and the idiosyncrasies of a twenty-year-old camper van form the fairways on which this story plays. From tee-off to putting the final hole, this is a true Irish golfing adventure.

'What's so special about Thomond Park? The crowd. Simply the crowd. The atmosphere is electric.' Donal Spring, one of Munster rugby's greatest. Since the first game played there in 1934, Thomond Park has become one of the world's iconic rugby venues. It is a magnificent stadium, famous for many great occasions, notably Munster's 1978 victory over the All Blacks and the 'Miracle Match' against Gloucester in 2003. It also has a worldwide reputation for tradition, wit and an outstanding sense of fair play. Here the history of Thomond Park is traced in a colourful and entertaining style, featuring some rare photos of Munster favourite Paul O'Connell, and highlighting great games played and great characters who have graced the arena.

A passionate advocate and a charming storyteller, Finegan combines a writer's eye, a historian's knowledge, and a golfer's sense of wonder to provide an impossibly ambitious grand tour of this beautiful land.

“If you liked Chaos, you’ll love Complexity. Waldrop creates the most exciting intellectual adventure story of the year” (The Washington Post). In a rarified world of scientific research, a revolution has been brewing. Its activists are not anarchists, but rather Nobel Laureates in physics and economics and pony-tailed graduates, mathematicians, and computer scientists from all over the world. They have formed an iconoclastic think-tank and their radical idea is to create a new science: complexity. They want to know how a primordial soup of simple molecules managed to turn itself into the first living cell—and what the origin of life some four billion years ago can tell us about the process of technological innovation today. This book is their story—the story of how they have tried to forge what they like to call the science of the twenty-first century. “Lucidly shows physicists, biologists, computer scientists and economists swapping metaphors and reveling in the sense that epochal discoveries are just around the corner . . . [Waldrop] has a special talent for relaying the exhilaration of moments of intellectual insight.” —The New York Times Book Review “Where I enjoyed the book was when it dove into the actual question of complexity, talking about complex systems in economics, biology, genetics, computer modeling, and so on. Snippets of rare beauty here and there almost took your breath away.” —Medium “[Waldrop] provides a good grounding of what may indeed be the first flowering of a new science.” —Publishers Weekly