Review: 'Seabiscuit' a winning read

"Seabiscuit: An American Legend"
By Laura Hillenbrand
Random House
History/Sports
399 pages

In this story: Achievement of horse and man High points RELATED SITES

By Robert Beveridge
Special to CNN

(CNN) -- On the back cover of "Seabiscuit: An American Legend," Laura Hillenbrand's fellow racing writer William Nack calls it "... a marvelous narrative of nonfiction that reads like a novel." That superlative is starting to read like a cliche these days, but for Hillenbrand's book it fits.

One reason is that Hillenbrand eschews footnotes; even the small superscript numbers we're used to seeing have gone the way of the great Auk here. This is not to say that the notes don't exist; they're arranged at the end by page number, with a quick clip of the text and the appropriate endnote. Don't let the lack of little numbers lead you to believe Hillenbrand didn't do her research.

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The end result is a book that flows. Hillenbrand's prose has the rhythm, color, and wit of the veteran racetrack raconteur regaling more casual fans with tales of the glory days of horseracing. It still happens today, of course. Many people remember where they were when Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes, just as many remember where they were when President Kennedy was shot. And in his time, the glorious little horse Seabiscuit was even more popular than the big red colt whose world record for a mile and a half still stands today.

Achievement of horse and man

Most people, even those unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the racing world, are at least familiar with the name Seabiscuit. A series of collectables, a children's book, a Shirley Temple film (described by Hillenbrand, amusingly, as "unforgivably awful") all conspire to brand the name into the hearts and minds of Americans sixty years after his retirement from the track.

But few of us remember the achievement of both horse and man that Seabiscuit himself represented. Hillenbrand's task was to take the hollow shell of celebrity and fill it with the horse and his handlers. She does the job admirably.

"Seabiscuit: An American Legend" begins (aside from some background info on the human players involved) with Charles Howard buying the horse from the barn of "Sunny" Jim Fitzsimmons, a trainer whose name still rings deep in the hearts of many horse fans. Tom Smith, who trained for Howard, was convinced he could do a better job with the horse than Fitzsimmons, and history speaks for itself.

High points

Hillenbrand fills in the gaps conventional history leaves, touching on the many high points of Seabiscuit's career after he came under the care of Howard and Smith, but also giving us glimpses of the stretches between.

We see the basic humanity of Howard, Smith, and Seabiscuit's two regular jockeys, Red Pollard and George Woolf. We also see the "equinity," for lack of a better term, of Seabiscuit himself. Writing a gripping account of the match race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral, still referred to by more aged racetrackers as the best horse race ever run, is kid stuff; making Seabiscuit's training regimen and naptimes just as interesting is what makes this such a fantastic book.

Another back cover blurb, this one from Washington Post racing correspondent and notorious curmudgeon Andy Beyer, says "(t)his ranks with the best books ever written about Thoroughbred racing."

He couldn't be more right.

Seabiscuit Online
Random House

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