Seabiscuit: A Book About Horse Racing

We carry our boundaries around with us. Many of them are simply the limits of our experience. Great books help us transcend those boundaries. By that test, Seabiscuit is a great book and Laura Hillenbrand is a great writer.

The story that she tells, by now, is well known. We have the short, funny looking horse whose potential is recognized and realized by an unlikely trio of men, each of whom is distinct and each of whom is damaged in some way.

Tom Smith is the silent cowboy watching the world he loved slip away into history, holding on by doing the one thing he can do well-work with horses. Red Pollard is the jockey who’s not having a lot of success. He’s a little too big and a little too battered. Charles Howard is the successful businessman who had lost a son.

The trio, with occasional help from jockey George Woolf, rides with Seabiscuit to heights of popularity and interest that exceed even the President. Along the way there is triumph and despair, winning and losing, good luck and bad, all the stuff of a gripping yarn. Along the way you learn a lot, too.

You learn about horse racing. Laura Hillenbrand knows a lot about horses and horse racing, but she wears that knowledge lightly. If you, like me, knew next to nothing about horses and racing before picking up this book, by the end you will know a lot more. And you will have learned it painlessly.

Hillenbrand is exceptional at wrapping her teaching in stories. She explains and defines only as much as necessary and lets the stories do the rest. She can convey technical details without damaging the pace or passion of the story.

Like most good true stories this one has lots of lessons, but they’re yours to fashion. There are no “author’s message” passages that tell you what the lesson should be. But there are stories that grip you and pull you forward.

This is more than just a book that will keep you up reading late into the night. It is a book that is so engaging and powerful that when it is over, you will not want it to end. When the Most Beautiful Woman in the World finished the book, at about 2 AM, she kept reading all the way through the acknowledgements in their tiny type until there was absolutely no more she could read.