Thundering Hooves

The three books reviewed here represent good examples of both ways of looking at this animal: the idealistic and the practical. The first two books are either for or by horsemen, though that may be stretching it somewhat in the case of To the Swift, edited by New York Times sportswriter Joe Drape, since it's a compilation of sportswriting about Triple Crown winners in the 100-year history of the event. If you are a fan of thoroughbred racing, it's a pretty good read, bearing in mind, which sportswriters can't avoid, that horse racing is about money, not about horses. There is a certain obligatory dose of hero-worship about the great champions like Secretariat and Citation in these pieces, but no more than sportswriters usually show toward boxers. Like boxers, successful race horses are said to have "a great heart," meaning that they keep going when another horse would slow down and catch its breath.

The basic questions here, as at the track and the off-track betting parlor, are "Did he win?" and, if so, by how many lengths, and what was the payoff? Sentimentality is not a notable feature of horse racing, any more than it is of boxing, and none of the writers wastes his time trying to make the horse seem warm and fuzzy. However, those who are interested in good writing could do worse than to read Drape's collection. The sportswriters he has picked are brilliant at packing the maximum amount of information into the shortest possible narrative, and still making a story of it. Drape has a good eye for the best of the best, in this case Red Smith and the immortal Arthur Daley, who write more to the point about racing than do the more "literary" writers in the book like Jane Smiley and Laura Hillenbrand.

Here's Daley on Count Fleet, the favorite for the 1943 Kentucky Derby: "Count Fleet will win the Kentucky Derby by either a length or a mile at Churchill Downs today. The Count is a cinch. The Count can't miss. If he does fail to capture the classic there undoubtedly will be mass suicide by those lovers of horseflesh whose only interest in the sport is the improving of the breed -- and the collecting of winning pari-mutuel tickets." The Count went on to win the Triple Crown.

My Guy Barbaro is jockey Edgar Prado's paean to Barbaro, the horse he rode to victory in the 2006 Kentucky Derby and that shattered a leg coming out of the starting gate at the Preakness. Barbaro survived eight months of veterinary treatment only to be put down in the end. Prado (with his co-writer John Eisenberg) tries hard for a blend of hero-worship and tear-jerking sentimentality, and almost succeeds, but Prado is too much of a horseman to ignore the fact that racing is a tough business and that even a great horse and jockey can't beat bad luck. My Guy Barbaro is good, fast reading because it's clear that Prado is not only a great jockey but also a real horseman, who can take in a horse's strengths and weaknesses at a glance, and figure out what makes it tick. He's even better at describing what makes a jockey tick, the strategy of riding a race, how to get the most out of a horse, and the ways a horse and jockey can bond as a racing team. Prado makes the reader realize how well he and Barbaro understood each other. Clearly, Barbaro was a great horse.

Joe Camp's The Soul of a Horse takes a more modern, more romantic view. Camp, the creator of the canine movie star Benji, came to horses late in life and set out to unlock what he takes to be the mystery of their souls. He wants to learn from the horse, rather than teach it. He fixates on the idea that the horse is born wild and that the herd life remains in its head -- to paraphrase Rousseau on mankind, the horse is born free, yet everywhere is in chains. Its behavior is governed by flight reaction; as prey its instinct is to bolt at the first sign of danger. This is nothing new. All horsemen know this; indeed, the reason why horses can be raced is that it comes naturally to them. But the modern horse has had most of this genetic programming carefully bred and trained out of it. A thousand-pound animal that wants to kick, buck and bolt at every sudden noise or movement is a danger to everybody around it. It is not part of the horseman's job to become part of the horse herd, as Camp apparently wants us to do, but to get the horse to accustom itself to our world, since that's where it lives, for better or worse, now that we have domesticated it.

Camp alternates his own experiences in achieving a "natural" relationship with his horses with descriptions of life in a more or less mythical horse herd. This part, like most stories told from an animal's viewpoint, will put off some readers and attract others. I have to admit that I found many of the passages ("The stallion slid up next to the matriarch, adding his burning stare to hers") a little too anthropomorphic, but for those who like that sort of thing it is by no means as sappy as some efforts.

Camp has a passion -- some might say a bee in his bonnet -- about not shoeing horses, and a firm conviction that pulling off a horse's shoes will give it "a longer, healthier, happier life." A good case can be made for this argument; the American Plains Indians never shod their horses, many Westerners still don't, and even people who do shoe them often take the shoes off for the winter. Despite Camp's enthusiasm, though, neophyte horse owners might do well to pause before taking those shoes off, since Camp also seems to feel that many of the uses to which owners put their horses are unnatural, including dressage, racing, Western cutting, show jumping and much else.

Still, one cannot help but be touched by Camp's love and sympathy for the animals and by his eloquence on the subject. Like him, I have very seldom met a horse that I didn't like better than its owner. ·

Michael Korda is the author of "Horse People" and "Ike: An American Hero," and co-author with his wife, Margaret, of "How to Keep a Horse at Home."