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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
love Laura Hillenbrand's historical stories, definitely recommend this one.
I’m beginning to think I reeeeeally like Laura Hillenbrand. Anyway, this book is perfectly written with no detail too minor or too much. The historical events are somehow made current for the reader, as if you are there. Saucy little Seabiscuit has made me a fan.
I waited too long to read this book. What a cool story about loyalty and perseverance.
This book reads at a quick pace, and I learned so much about the horse racing world. In the beginning I almost gave up on it because it was going into quite a bit of detail about the life of a jockey, and I wanted to get on with Seabiscuit's story, but in the end those details helped me visualize the life of Red Pollard. It was very interesting, and I found myself reading faster and faster during the racing scenes. I could easily picture it all in my mind and I was rooting for Seabiscuit at every turn!
This is absolutely one of the best books I've ever read. Informative, suspenseful, interesting, and engaging. Laura Hillenbrand really has a knack for finding underappreciated, yet amazing true stories, and she does the research to back them with specific facts that bring the story back to life. Fabulous writing, and very informative - I learned a lot about racing, horses, jockeys, and all of the people involved with the events in the book. This really helped to create a sense of the story and added significantly to her storytelling - I was literally on the edge of my seat one morning at the dentist's office! I would recommend to anyone, regardless of your opinion of historical fiction.
Wonderfully written. It sweeps you up in the excitement of the era for the rise of this incredible race horse. Loved all the explanation, background and period details.
Knowing nothing about horse racing before this book, I thought Hillenbrand did an amazing job of bringing it to life (although the book is about much more than racing). I fell in love with Seabiscuit and loved learning about the team that helped him realize his greatness. It lagged a little in the middle for me personally, but it was worth it in the end!
Enthralling.
I enjoyed this MUCH more than I expected. It felt more like a super-hero novel (with a main character who got a rough start in life, had someone see the diamond within, win big, lose everything, then come back for one final rally.) I literally had trouble putting the book down (I even read it while riding the train to sneak in a couple extra pages) and my heart started pounding during a couple of the races (especially since I had no idea historically what the outcomes were.) In other words, this book was a RIDE.
The same things that made the book so interesting (the break-neck pace and colorful descriptions) are why I don't quite feel like it was a 5-star read. Even for such an incredible history, there were tinges of triumphalism and rose-colored narration. Some sections were almost comically dramatic,
"He was fifty-six but he looked much older. His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something--an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post--but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. On the rare occasions when he took off his gray felt fedora, you had to look hard at his threadbare head to tell where his gray hair ended and his gray skin began. When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space."
"His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow."
"Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air."
and a section that actually made my eyes water from trying not to laugh...
"Behind them, the irresistible force of the flood met the immovable object of the manure pile. The water won. The mound, a marvel of solidity for a decade, was uprooted whole and began to shudder along in one murderous mass. It rolled over the San Diego and Arizona railroad tracks that fed the racetrack, tearing them out. Moving as if animated with destructive desire, it gurgled down the backstretch, banked around the far turn, bore out in the homestretch, and mowed down the entire grandstand. It made a beeline for the Monte Carlo Casino, crashing straight through its walls and cracking it wide open. Then, like a might shit Godzilla, it slid out to sea and vanished.
All of this descriptive language was entertaining, but sometimes felt like it obscured fact for the sentimentality of family members or old friends who served as sources for this book. I don't know if there was an easy way to avoid this, but it left some of the people feeling a bit like caricatures. Issues like Pollard's alcoholism were referenced, but since he was portrayed as the underdog hero, it was unclear how his actions under the influence may have hurt/affected those around him.
*Trigger warning for those with eating disorders*
Something that I did appreciate in this book was its detailed examination of Jockeys and how utterly horrific their lifestyles often were. The descriptions of how jockeys became bulimic or flat-out starved themselves were absolutely terrifying, not to mention the multiple deaths and injuries that were recorded in this book from races at the time. I appreciated how the author took a bit of space to address the union-busting and bullying that happened to prevent jockeys from actually having basic health-coverage. If anything, it made me wish the author had discussed more some of the ways that racing itself has changed since the 1930s-1940s, but I guess that was outside of the main scope of the story she was telling. It was strange (and predictable), though, to see a juxtaposition of the mega-rich gambling community and the people who worked underneath them and actually did the work and took the risk for the races. I think that it's telling that between Seabiscuit, his owner, his trainer, and his two main jockeys, the only ones to get a "happy ending" were the millionaire and his horse.
I also would have liked to see more of a discussion of who was excluded from racing back in the day (POC jockeys or women in general) but other than covering what a scumbag Irwin was to Native tribes and a reference to Bob Rowe ("one of only a handful of black horsemen training in that era") the book did not do much to illuminate the social climate of the sport itself that could have led to a more wholistic understanding of Seabiscuit's society.
All of that being said, I had a great time and am now off to go finish watching the "Secretariat" movie since these moments in athletic history are truly incredible to watch even though I am saddened by many of the systems that exploited both animals and people along the way.
I enjoyed this MUCH more than I expected. It felt more like a super-hero novel (with a main character who got a rough start in life, had someone see the diamond within, win big, lose everything, then come back for one final rally.) I literally had trouble putting the book down (I even read it while riding the train to sneak in a couple extra pages) and my heart started pounding during a couple of the races (especially since I had no idea historically what the outcomes were.) In other words, this book was a RIDE.
The same things that made the book so interesting (the break-neck pace and colorful descriptions) are why I don't quite feel like it was a 5-star read. Even for such an incredible history, there were tinges of triumphalism and rose-colored narration. Some sections were almost comically dramatic,
"He was fifty-six but he looked much older. His jaw had a recalcitrant jut to it that implied a run-in with something--an errant hoof or an ill-placed fence post--but maybe it was the only shape in which it could have been drawn. He had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility. On the rare occasions when he took off his gray felt fedora, you had to look hard at his threadbare head to tell where his gray hair ended and his gray skin began. When photographed hatless, he had an unsettling tendency to blend with the sky, so that his eyes hung disembodied in space."
"His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow."
"Red Pollard was sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air."
and a section that actually made my eyes water from trying not to laugh...
"Behind them, the irresistible force of the flood met the immovable object of the manure pile. The water won. The mound, a marvel of solidity for a decade, was uprooted whole and began to shudder along in one murderous mass. It rolled over the San Diego and Arizona railroad tracks that fed the racetrack, tearing them out. Moving as if animated with destructive desire, it gurgled down the backstretch, banked around the far turn, bore out in the homestretch, and mowed down the entire grandstand. It made a beeline for the Monte Carlo Casino, crashing straight through its walls and cracking it wide open. Then, like a might shit Godzilla, it slid out to sea and vanished.
All of this descriptive language was entertaining, but sometimes felt like it obscured fact for the sentimentality of family members or old friends who served as sources for this book. I don't know if there was an easy way to avoid this, but it left some of the people feeling a bit like caricatures. Issues like Pollard's alcoholism were referenced, but since he was portrayed as the underdog hero, it was unclear how his actions under the influence may have hurt/affected those around him.
*Trigger warning for those with eating disorders*
Something that I did appreciate in this book was its detailed examination of Jockeys and how utterly horrific their lifestyles often were. The descriptions of how jockeys became bulimic or flat-out starved themselves were absolutely terrifying, not to mention the multiple deaths and injuries that were recorded in this book from races at the time. I appreciated how the author took a bit of space to address the union-busting and bullying that happened to prevent jockeys from actually having basic health-coverage. If anything, it made me wish the author had discussed more some of the ways that racing itself has changed since the 1930s-1940s, but I guess that was outside of the main scope of the story she was telling. It was strange (and predictable), though, to see a juxtaposition of the mega-rich gambling community and the people who worked underneath them and actually did the work and took the risk for the races. I think that it's telling that between Seabiscuit, his owner, his trainer, and his two main jockeys, the only ones to get a "happy ending" were the millionaire and his horse.
I also would have liked to see more of a discussion of who was excluded from racing back in the day (POC jockeys or women in general) but other than covering what a scumbag Irwin was to Native tribes and a reference to Bob Rowe ("one of only a handful of black horsemen training in that era") the book did not do much to illuminate the social climate of the sport itself that could have led to a more wholistic understanding of Seabiscuit's society.
All of that being said, I had a great time and am now off to go finish watching the "Secretariat" movie since these moments in athletic history are truly incredible to watch even though I am saddened by many of the systems that exploited both animals and people along the way.
I finally got around to reading this and I'm so glad that I did. Seabiscuit's story is well-known to racing fans, but mere racing statistics cannot explain this horse's popularity to Depression-era fans. Hillebrand never outright tells us why people cared so much about Sea Biscuit, but by the end of the book, its no surprise that his inspiring story resonated so much with his fans. Hillebrand is a talented writer--even in scenes where we know the outcome, such as in the match race with War Admiral, she has a great way of heightening the tension even more, so that we're just as excited to read about the race despite knowing how it ends. This is, of course, non-fiction, but Sea Biscuit's story has a natural arc that lends itself to this kind of storytelling. I think even non-horse lovers and people not caught up in the thrill of horse racing in the 1930s wil find a lot to like here. Well done.