Author Bill Barich started playing the horses out of the desperation bred by his mother’s battle with cancer. Other family sadnesses followed, and to escape their shadow, he decided to spend a season at Golden Gate Fields, a thoroughbred racetrack outside San Francisco. Barich’s attentive, anecdotal account of track life is keenly observed and placed in intriguingly wider contexts by his off-track learning; you’ll discover a good deal in these pages about the city of Florence and its Renaissance culture, for instance, and the author is ingenious enough to place his reading in conversation with the racing life around him. It is the kind of book that, once you’ve finished it, will make you long to be asked, “Read anything good lately?” You don’t need to love horse racing to fall in love with this book.