For lovers of golf and travel, a journey to the only golf course in the last Buddhist kingdom.

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. 

To enter, tell us what do the people at Bhutan use to trim their golf course? (HINT: you can find the answer here in this excerpt from Golfing on the Roof of the World). Please include your mailing address to enable us to send you a copy of the book should you win.

A dinner party to die for...a haunting and intimate account of the Roman author Petronius’s last twelve hours.

A.D. 66: Having been falsely implicated in a plot to assassinate the emperor Nero, Titus Petronius has a choice: await the executioner at dawn, or die a noble Roman death by his own hand. Deciding that his will be a suicide like no other the world has ever seen, he summons a small circle of intimate friends to his magnificent villa on the enchanting Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy. There, over the course of a balmy autumn’s night, Petronius throws the party of a lifetime. As they feast on course after course of the most sumptuous and exotic fare the empire has to offer, his guests are expressly forbidden to dwell on the imminent tragedy; instead, they are enjoined to sing, eat, drink, and celebrate. But as his life dwindles to a few precious hours, Petronius himself cannot shake off the ghosts of his past or his regret over mistakes that can no longer be set right. With the fateful dawn approaching, he recalls the great love affair of his life, and his years as Nero’s “Arbiter of Elegance.” Not until the very end will he bequeath his magnum opus, The Satyricon, to posterity.

Exquisitely written and profoundly moving, The Uncertain Hour is a vivid portrait of life in ancient Rome and a gripping entrée into the mind of a great man during his final hours.

To enter, tell us who is Demetrius trying to write a letter to in the opening chapter of The Uncertain Hour? (HINT: you can find the answer here in this excerpt from The Uncertain Hour). Please include your mailing address to enable us to send you a copy of the book should you win.