David Owen is an American journalist and nonfiction author whose subjects include golf, buildings, technology, money, and the environment. His golf books combine reporting with the experience of an amateur player. Other works investigate ordinary systems and objects, including houses, copying machines, household finances, water use, and hearing. This is the nonfiction writer associated with The New Yorker, rather than the British novelist of the same name.
Owen’s golf bibliography includes My Usual Game, The Making of the Masters, The Chosen One, Hit & Hope, and the humorous Complete Office Golf. These books take different approaches: personal essays, tournament history, a study of an emerging sports celebrity, and a playful adaptation of the game to an office setting.
David Owen Books
| Book | Year | Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Walls Around Us | 1991 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| My Usual Game | 1995 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Around the House | 1998 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Complete Office Golf | 1999 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Making of the Masters | 1999 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Chosen One | 2001 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Hit & Hope | 2003 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The First National Bank of Dad | 2003 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Copies in Seconds | 2004 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Sheetrock & Shellac | 2006 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Green Metropolis | 2009 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| The Conundrum | 2012 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Where the Water Goes | 2017 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
| Volume Control | 2019 | Description / Buy at Amazon |
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Golf Books
My Usual Game: Adventures in Golf: Owen explores his attachment to golf through experiences as an amateur player and observer of the professional game. His account includes instruction, travel, equipment, tournament participation, and time spent with other golfers. The book considers why a game that repeatedly frustrates its participants can still organize friendships, ambitions, routines, and a substantial part of a player’s leisure.
The Complete Office Golf: This humorous guide adapts golf to an office environment, turning work spaces and ordinary furnishings into features of a makeshift course. Owen describes ways to arrange holes and confront hazards within the building. The book treats the office as material for a comic variation on golf, using the game’s familiar practices in an unlikely setting.
The Making of the Masters: Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf's Most Prestigious Tournament: Owen investigates the development of the Masters and Augusta National, examining how a tournament became a central event in professional golf. The book considers the course, the club, and the traditions associated with the competition. Its subject is the creation of a sporting institution, including the relationship between the tournament’s distinctive setting and its wider reputation.
The Chosen One: Tiger Woods and the Dilemma of Greatness by David Owen: This book examines Tiger Woods’s early prominence and the expectations surrounding his career. Owen considers the golfer’s development, the role of his father, and the extraordinary public attention directed toward him. Woods’s emergence becomes a way to investigate sporting ambition, family influence, celebrity, and the meaning attached to a young athlete’s anticipated place in golf history.
Hit & Hope: How the Rest of Us Play Golf: Owen writes about golf from the perspective of an ordinary player whose routines include imperfect practice, occasional superstition, and regular games with friends. The book follows the habits and frustrations that make recreational golf different from its professional ideal. Its essays consider how amateur players live with inconsistent results while continuing to organize time and companionship around the game.
Other Books
The First National Bank of Dad: The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money: Owen examines how parents introduce children to money and why conventional approaches can make saving unattractive. Drawing on his own family experience, he describes a system intended to make financial choices more understandable and rewarding. The book focuses on the practical relationship between spending, saving, incentives, and a child’s growing responsibility for decisions about money.
Copies in Seconds: Owen reconstructs the development of the plain-paper copier through the life and work of inventor Chester Carlson. The account follows an idea that initially attracted little enthusiasm but eventually changed office work. Technical experimentation, personal persistence, and the process of bringing an unfamiliar invention into commercial use connect Carlson’s individual story with a major technological change.
Sheetrock & Shellac: A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement: These essays examine houses and renovation through the relationship between physical spaces and the people who occupy them. Owen considers projects of different sizes and the personal choices involved in changing a home. The book treats building and repair as everyday activities that reveal preferences, habits, aspirations, and the ways people make a place their own.
Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability: Owen challenges assumptions about environmentally responsible living by examining dense cities, especially New York. He argues that compact development can reduce the resources and transportation required by individual residents. The book considers housing, travel, energy use, and the relationship between personal environmental intentions and the larger physical arrangements that determine how people actually consume resources.
The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse: This examination of environmental policy questions whether greater efficiency necessarily produces lower consumption. Owen considers technologies and practices marketed as sustainable and investigates the possibility that savings can encourage additional use. The book asks readers to distinguish improvements in the efficiency of particular activities from reductions in total resource demand across a society organized around consumption.
Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River: Owen follows the Colorado River from its headwaters toward its diminished lower reaches, investigating where the water goes and who depends on it. His reporting includes cities, farms, reservoirs, power generation, and the systems used to distribute water. The book connects physical geography with competing claims on a resource central to life across much of the American West.
Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World: Owen investigates hearing, hearing loss, and technologies intended to help people hear more effectively. The account considers the biological mechanisms of sound perception alongside the noise of everyday life and the experiences of people whose hearing changes. Medical research and personal reporting connect an easily overlooked sense with communication, aging, and the practical challenges of treatment.