Sharpen your game with Dave Pelz's book "Golf Without Fear: How to Play the 10 most Feared Shots in Golf with Confidence"

I love Dave Pelz (and not just because I’m a Mickelson guy).

Anybody who’s smart enough to work for NASA and then smart enough to quit messing around in space to worry about what’s important in the world – playing golf – has my respect.

His NASA-like research into golf is the stuff of legend. He puts the statistics he’s gathered through his research, his golf schools and reader surveys at Golf.com to good use in his latest book, “Dave Pelz’s Golf Without Fear: How to Play the 10 most Feared Shots in Golf with Confidence.”

The 10 shots are: lag putts, a ball tucked against a wall, a greenside pitch, hitting between trees, buried lies in the sand, cut-lob shots, downhill lies, tight lies, greenside sand and short putts. If I had to rank them in order of my fears, I’d probably go with downhill lies, hitting between trees and lag putts as my top three.

As with most instruction books, it can get a bit too technical and preachy, but its step-by-step basics and photography allow for easy digestion. The “Golfer’s-Eye View” images, a new technology, show how each fix should look to the player in real dimension, not a third-party viewer. It shows the golfer’s body in relation to the target and allows the reader to see the shot without being on the course.

Co-written with Dave Allen and Eddie Pelz, the book, released by Gotham Books Nov. 11, retails for $35.