The original edition of The Confidential Guide to Golf Courses was written when Tom Doak was 27, for forty of his friends: a dead-honest review of every course he had seen in his travels, and whether it was worth going out of their way to see. Its uncensored, pithy and insightful reviews quickly became controversial, but also a must-have collector’s item, with Xeroxed pirate copies circulating around the golf business until the book was officially published in 1996. In this completely new edition, loaded with fantastic photography, Tom reviews every one of the more than 1,500 courses he has seen to date, and his three co-authors bring the total up to more than 2,000 courses around the world. If a course is worth seeing, it’s in the book — and if it’s not worth seeing, The Confidential Guide will save you the trouble and expense of finding out for yourself.
Volume 5, completed prior to Volume 4, covers Asia and the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand. Co-authors Darius Oliver from Australia and Masa Nishijima from Japan help cover those countries in more depth than any other book on golf courses, while Tom searched out-of-the-way locales from Fiji to Saipan to Sri Lanka. Not many golfers have made the trek to the Himalayan Golf Course in Nepal, but for the adventurous golfing soul, Volume 5 is full of bucket-list destinations.
