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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
I listened to the audio version. It was a little hard to get into but was a solid listen once the author got down to telling the story. The passages describing the course of each race were particularly good.
A truly great horse whose story deserves to be told and retold.
A truly great horse whose story deserves to be told and retold.
A slow read without any fire. I was hoping for another Seabiscuit but this is more like Slowpoke.
William Nack, Secretariat: The Making of a Champion 2/E (Da Capo, 2002)
I finished this book back in July, and here it is November. I don't know why it is that I sometimes have problems figuring out what to say about a book to the point where I end up leaving it for four months, and why it is that it's always a horse book (to this day, I still have not reviewed Jane Schwartz' Ruffian: Burning from the Start, which I read in 2004) that causes this sort of blockage, but so it is.
Obviously, this is the story of Secretariat, the horse who wowed a nation in 1972 and 1973. The subtitle should have twigged me to the fact that the later part of his career was going to get short shrift, but somehow I didn't grasp that until I got to the penultimate chapter and we were still only up to the Belmont. Still, it's your basic horse biography—a focus on the horse himself, yes, but also a lot of talking about the horse's connections. Oftentimes, that's not nearly as interesting (at least, for the horse lover), but Nack's writing combined with the momentous events going on around him at the time keep the areas where the book focuses on the human part of the equation almost as interesting as the parts about Secretariat himself. (Prospective authors of horse biographies may be wondering just how much, in fact, readers can take of reading about stall routines, workouts, getting ready for races, cooling down from races, and all the rest of the minutiae of the horse himself. I'm here to tell you that such a book would be my favorite of the horse biographies I've read.)
The new edition of the book published in 2002 also contains, as an afterword, Nack's touching Sports Illustrated essay on Secretariat's death, for which Nack—purely by coincidence—was on hand. Even if you already own the original edition of the book, it's at least worth getting it out of the library to read the supplementary materials in the updated edition. This is very good stuff, as most horse biographies are. ****
I finished this book back in July, and here it is November. I don't know why it is that I sometimes have problems figuring out what to say about a book to the point where I end up leaving it for four months, and why it is that it's always a horse book (to this day, I still have not reviewed Jane Schwartz' Ruffian: Burning from the Start, which I read in 2004) that causes this sort of blockage, but so it is.
Obviously, this is the story of Secretariat, the horse who wowed a nation in 1972 and 1973. The subtitle should have twigged me to the fact that the later part of his career was going to get short shrift, but somehow I didn't grasp that until I got to the penultimate chapter and we were still only up to the Belmont. Still, it's your basic horse biography—a focus on the horse himself, yes, but also a lot of talking about the horse's connections. Oftentimes, that's not nearly as interesting (at least, for the horse lover), but Nack's writing combined with the momentous events going on around him at the time keep the areas where the book focuses on the human part of the equation almost as interesting as the parts about Secretariat himself. (Prospective authors of horse biographies may be wondering just how much, in fact, readers can take of reading about stall routines, workouts, getting ready for races, cooling down from races, and all the rest of the minutiae of the horse himself. I'm here to tell you that such a book would be my favorite of the horse biographies I've read.)
The new edition of the book published in 2002 also contains, as an afterword, Nack's touching Sports Illustrated essay on Secretariat's death, for which Nack—purely by coincidence—was on hand. Even if you already own the original edition of the book, it's at least worth getting it out of the library to read the supplementary materials in the updated edition. This is very good stuff, as most horse biographies are. ****
This was a re-read (because could you possibly think I'd have missed this seminal work of equine biography? No no no), and it was diverting as always.