A Thrill On Every Page | Seabiscuit: An American Legend

Very Informational. A fun read. | Seabiscuit: An American Legend | Laura Hillenbrand

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	• Seabiscuit: An American Legend Laura Hillenbrand Ballantine Books, 2002 - 399 pages average customer review:based on 654 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The little horse that could...and did!

I could see that this book has rave reviews, and there is not much more that I could add. Here on the East Coast we only have heard of War Admiral. I never heard of Seabiscuit until the movie came out some years ago. I was not thinking of reading it until the local reading group at the library had it as a selection. It's a winner! The story is wonderful, and true. Laura Hillerbrand can write non-fiction in an exciting way that captivates the reader. She knows her horse racing but she doesn't deluge the reader with a glut of "racing-ology". She gives you enough to stay in the race. And she can really play out the scene in a way that has you racing pages. The story leading up to the match with the East Coast champion is enticing enough. But the race!? It is like you are there! The movie could not do the justice to Seabiscuit that Hillerbrand does. I know nothing about horses, and I enjoyed the biography of Monty Roberts, the "Man Who Listens to Horses". I enjoyed this much more.

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A Thrill On Every Page

A story about a horse that celebrates the triumph of the human spirit, "Seabiscuit" is almost too good to be true. Yet Laura Hillenbrand's 2001 book about an ungainly thoroughbred who would win 33 races and upend a sport comes with generous footnotes that tether it to reality.

Even so, the book starts with a bit of a whopper: The claim Seabiscuit was a bigger newsmaker in 1938 than FDR or Hitler. Snopes.com picks this one apart, though it doesn't change a jot of my admiration for the book or its author. Some authors work with dry data and musty factoids. Hillenbrand resurrects passions and reassembles the texture of the times from living memory. You may get a tall tale or two, but more important is an immersive feeling of what it was like to have been a witness to something so ridiculously grand and heart-tugging.

As much as the book is about the horse, it's even more about his most regular rider, the half-blind, busted-down, habitually unlucky Red Pollard. When Pollard and the Biscuit came together, history was made, and made again. Hillenbrand puts you with Pollard in the saddle.

"With the crowd on its feet, Pollard spread himself flat over Seabiscuit's withers, reins clutched in his left hand, right hand pressed flat to Seabiscuit's neck, head turned and eyes fixed on Professor Paul's broad blaze," she writes.

The fact Pollard suffered so much to get where he was comes across vividly. Hillenbrand herself suffered from a decades-long chronic exhaustive condition while writing this, and seems to channel her experience in Pollard especially, "sinking downward through his life with the pendulous motion of a leaf falling through still air." It accounts for some undeniable lack of critical reserve, but at the same time, her poetic turns of phrase and ability to lay out the technical dimensions of the sport and of Seabiscuit's abilities (including the horse's unorthodox, swivel-legged gait) break through the jargony boundaries of horseracing in high, readable style.

About the most difficulty I've had reading this book (three times already) is from the fear of getting my heart broken, even when I think I know what happens next. Seabiscuit was no natural world-beater; he lost to more than a few horses and was an underdog from his earliest racing days to his final run. Pollard got injured so badly on a racetrack he was thought to be at death's door, then went back only to suffer another catastrophic injury that everyone but Pollard thought had ended his career.

"Getting back on the horse" is a common term these days; Pollard's story gives it deeper meaning. In Seabiscuit he found his ticket to glory, with Hillenbrand you get to share his ride.

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Very Informational. A fun read.

I really enjoyed this book. The pictures added so much to the story. The book was well researched and led me into the world of horse racing. It was fascinating to read how the lives of three very different men and one horse wove together to create a memorable moment in history.

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Absolutely fantastic

Seabiscuit is amazing in the audio book version. I listened to it on the way to work and back. More than once i found myself hands clinched to the steering wheel in my driveway listening. This is the best audio book that i've ever listened to. I hope that you enjoy it.

absolute best

It is one of the best books I have ever read. It was a fascinating story from page one all the way to the last one, and I am not even a horse person. I am very happy I stumbled across it at the library.

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Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit?s fortunes:

Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.

Author Laura Hillenbrand brilliantly re-creates a universal underdog story, one that proves life is a horse race.

From the Hardcover edition.

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