Welcome to Reading the Game, sportswriter Jeffrey Prest's review of sporting books, both old and new.

The review of Bud Sweat & Tees - Rich Beem's walk on the wild side of the PGA Tour follows beneath the dotted line.

In the meantime, you'll find out a bit more about me in the panel at the foot of this page.

Publishers - if you'd like me to review any of your sports titles, please click the Contact oldestmember link beneath my photo.

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Given the title and what little I'd heard about Rich Beem since he became the 2002 USPGA champion, I expected little more than a 317-page comic when this book came my way. By the time I finished it, it had become one of the best golf books I have ever read.

Everyone who buys into the notion that the PGA Tour is filled by grey men should read this account of Beem's rise to the top. It is my belief that there are plenty of characters in professional golf, it's just that the Tour has now become such a corporate monolith that too many of its members are afraid to venture beyond the trite soundbite for fear of prejudicing their standing in one of the biggest gravy trains in professional sport (as I write this, the mediocrity of 81st place on the 2008 Tour moneylist is still good enough for a million dollars in prize money).

That's not to say they all come as colourful as Beem, mind. In a world far removed from the obsequiousness found at the Court of King Tiger, Sports Illustrated writer Alan Shipnuck candidly chronicles the diverse paths that brought two gadflies together for one brief tilt at the big time.

Handling the clubs is Beem, a talented golfer whose love of the good life leaves him close but not touching where success on Tour is concerned.

Handling the bag is caddie Steve Duplantis, another bon viveur whose story will make all but the most hopelessly chaotic employee feel instantly better about himself. His MySpace page gives you a flavour of the man.

Behind the larks, however, are two men with a genuine talent for their line of work and it finally all comes together in one glorious weekend at Hazeltine National in August 2002.

That Beem's PGA Championship triumph occupies such a small part of the book tells you that this is far more than just some cliched rags-to-riches yarn.

I love the book for three reasons:

1. As a Brit, it was a joy to discard the lingering stuffiness that surrounds golf on this side of the Atlantic and see the sport through some very different eyes. For all its exclusive country club connotations, golf in the States still feels less like the status symbol it is in the UK and more like a game. Guys head for the first tee with a view to grinding each other into the dust rather than spending three hours discussing private education and whether Malcolm or Piers should get the sales manager's job. I can't tell you what a breath of fresh air this is...

2. As we are all frail flesh, any story that shows talent prevailing in men who otherwise tend to get in their own way has an inevitable, consolatory appeal. For the Captain Sensibles among us, Duplantis' wild, juggling-act existence in particular (a single parent caddying on the Tour?!) is horribly compelling and his tragic death - struck by a passing taxi in January '08 - will only add a poignancy to the book for those yet to read it.

3. Shipnuck's handling of his material is excellent. He rarely judges his characters but instead relays their stories and lets his readers make their own minds up. Golf can be a slow game but not when it's written like this

Thomas Boswell's Strokes of Genius (a very different literary exercise from this one, it must be said) remains my all-time favourite golf book but Shipnuck may just have nailed down second place with this breathless read and the purists of the Warren Wind and Darwin schools will just have to lump it.

He has lifted the curtain on the PGA Tour and brought two men and their time so vividly to life you half expect to be handed their bar tab. Whether it's Sunday at Augusta or Saturday night in the lives of Beem and Duplantis, you can ask no more of a writer than that he makes you feel like you were there.

I'm a sportswriter who has worked for publications on both sides of the Atlantic.

A sports junkie since puberty, I was mercifully 'let go' by the legal profession in 1995 to pursue a freelance writing career that had seen me cover golf and soccer for English and American titles and American sports for England's Birmingham Post newspaper.

Starting in 1996, I spent two-and-a-half years working for the press office of Britain's Budweiser Basketball League, followed by three years writing the matchday programme and club magazine for one of England's Premier League soccer clubs, Aston Villa.

Since 2001, I have worked for Emap (now Bauer), as features editor for Sea Angler magazine and latterly Trout Fisherman. You'll find my fly fishing blog at Taunted By Waters.