Not Hard to Pick a Gift for Certain Customers This Holiday

It's funny that sometimes you look at the season and there our lots of solid picks in one area, say science, but there isn't a good biography for women to speak of. This year there seems to be a lot of everything. You like baseball? There's Jane Leavy's The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood. More of a music fan? Are you more Sinatra (Frank: The Voice, by James Kaplan) or Rolling Stones (Life, by Keith Richards).

Are you a history fan? Well, John Adams is represented in Joseph Ellis's The First Family, while Edmund Morris has Colonel Roosevelt. And this doesn't include some of the books I talked about at the Woman's Club luncheon, such as Ron Chernow's Washington and Barnet Schecter's George Washington's America.

Of course one might say this is a great choice indeed, for my great uncle Vanderbilt Carruthers. But these are categories that we need to know about at Christmas (and a bit, though just a fraction as much, for Father's Day). So of course that made me wonder, what's the most in-demand golf book on Ingram's database right now. Even when golf was hot, this store wasn't golf central, but as I say, at Christmas, can be a bit different.

It turned out to be Don't Choke, by Gary Player. "Who's Gary Player?", one of my booksellers ask me. Being that I knew who this was and had no interest in golf, the whole thing made me feel old.