Throwing the Book at an Error-Strewn Golf Book

So I picked up a book recently entitled From the Links: Golf's Most Memorable Moments. It's one of those vignette golf books: short entries of famous (and not so famous) moments, incidents, occurrences, achievements and so on through golf history.

I like those kinds of books. I wanted to like this one. Alas, this was the first sentence:

The 1938 US Open was held at the prestigious Cherry Hill Golf Club in New Jersey.

Uh ... no. The 1938 U.S. Open was played at Cherry Hills, not Cherry Hill. And Cherry Hills is in Colorado, not New Jersey.

Two errors, one minor, one major - in the very first sentence!

Now, I'm not one to be unforgiving about errors. Every writer makes mistakes. I probably make a lot of them; in fact, I'm sure I do. But I'm just a guy with a blog - not a book author who, presumably, had an editor.

The errors only mounted from there. On page 2, the author referred to "Ralph" when he was actually talking about a golfer named Ray Ainsley. On Page 8, the author states that Johnny McDermott "was unable to defend his British Open championship," which makes sense given that McDermott never won the British Open.

Mistakes like that pile up throughout the book. It's clear from his writing style that the author is not a professional writer. And the publishing house is a small one. But that's no excuse for failing to do a professional job on this book.