Seabiscuit: An American Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand
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Book Summary Information
Author: Laura HillenbrandEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2003-07-01
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 453
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Book Review: A Thrill On Every Page
Summary: 5 Stars
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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