Seabiscuit: An American Legend
by Laura Hillenbrand
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Book Summary Information
Author: Laura HillenbrandEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-07-01
ISBN: 0345465083
Number of pages: 453
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Product features:
- A Legend
- Alluring-Icons
- Engrossing
- Gripping
- Reads Like A Whirlwind
Book Reviews of Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Book Review: The Little Horse With a Big Heart
Summary: 5 Stars
Seabiscuit: The Little Horse With a Big Heart
In her story of Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand has opened a unique window into the world of horse racing. The main characters are a quiet horse trainer named Tom Smith, the flamboyant horse owner Charles Howard, a horse named Seabiscuit and jockey's Red Pollard and George Wolfe.
The owner and trainer first hooked up at the Aqua Caliente Race Track in Mexico. Smith and Howard were as opposite as night and day, but they made accommodations for each other's differences and their relationship flourished. Once Smith worked the stable's horses into racing condition they moved the operation north to Santa Anita and into Barn #38.
Their first season together was successful and near the end of the Santa Anita season Howard decided to move his stable to a small track in Michigan called the Detroit Fairgrounds. Smith was sent farther east to look for some mature horses to augment their juvenile stable. On June 29th at Boston's Suffolk Downs a horse stopped in front of Tom Smith and for a long moment the two eyed one another. Fate? The horse continued in the post parade, but Seabiscuit had gotten Smith's attention. It wasn't his build, he had a rectangular body with short legs, but Smith looked at the program and saw that the horse was a descendent of the great Man O' War and was sired by Hard Tack. Seabiscuit reflected none of the beauty and breadth of his forebears, but carried all the nasty, mean and unruly traits of the others.
Tom Smith wanted that horse and Charles Howard made arrangements. Seabiscuit was taken to the Howard barn, but the former owners had worn the horse out. Seabiscuit was exhausted from a hard racing campaign. The horse was only three years old and had already run as many races as most horses would accumulate in a full career. What Tom Smith wanted was time to rest the horse, and give himself a chance to figure out the horses problems and how best to deal with them. Seabiscuit had been abused by a number of jockey's and it would take some time to turn the horse's attitude around.
In November of 1936 Howard's stable of horses were in the San Francisco Bay area of California, the idea was to enter Seabiscuit in the Santa Anita handicap on February 27th of the next year.
Tom Smith had finally found a way to settle the horse down and got Seabiscuit interested in what he was born to do - run. They ran him in two prep races at Bay Meadows and won them both. Red Pollard was aboard in both wins. Then it was on to Southern California for two more prep races prior to the Santa Anita Handicap.
The big cap was run before 60, 000 raucous and cheering race fans. Pollard rode a perfect race weaving his way through the field and got the lead in the stretch - but the jockey let the horse relax around the eighth pole. No one knows for sure, but chances are due to Pollard's right blind eye he probably didn't see Rosemont flying down the middle of the track. Seabiscuit was overtaken and couldn't regain the momentum to win. He lost in a photo finish but won the hearts of Americans all over the depression-plagued land. There was something about that little horse that gave hope to millions who had little more than hope to cling to during those hard times.
Hillenbrand has fashioned a great horse story and readers will come away with knowledge that they could have only learned from a legend.
Tom Barnes author of `Doc Holliday's Road to Tombstone,' `The Goring Collection,' `The Hurricane Hunters and Lost in the Bermuda Triangle.'
Summary of Seabiscuit: An American Legend
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.
He didn't look like much. With his smallish stature, knobby knees, and slightly crooked forelegs, he looked more like a cow pony than a thoroughbred. But looks aren't everything; his quality, an admirer once wrote, "was mostly in his heart." Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of the horse who became a cultural icon in Seabiscuit: An American Legend.
Seabiscuit rose to prominence with the help of an unlikely triumvirate: owner Charles Howard, an automobile baron who once declared that "the day of the horse is past"; trainer Tom Smith, a man who "had cultivated an almost mystical communication with horses"; and jockey Red Pollard, who was down on his luck when he charmed a then-surly horse with his calm demeanor and a sugar cube. Hillenbrand details the ups and downs of "team Seabiscuit," from early training sessions to record-breaking victories, and from serious injury to "Horse of the Year"--as well as the Biscuit's fabled rivalry with War Admiral. She also describes the world of horseracing in the 1930s, from the snobbery of Eastern journalists regarding Western horses and public fascination with the great thoroughbreds to the jockeys' torturous weight-loss regimens, including saunas in rubber suits, strong purgatives, even tapeworms.
Along the way, Hillenbrand paints wonderful images: tears in Tom Smith's eyes as his hero, legendary trainer James Fitzsimmons, asked to hold Seabiscuit's bridle while the horse was saddled; critically injured Red Pollard, whose chest was crushed in a racing accident a few weeks before, listening to the San Antonio Handicap from his hospital bed, cheering "Get going, Biscuit! Get 'em, you old devil!"; Seabiscuit happily posing for photographers for several minutes on end; other horses refusing to work out with Seabiscuit because he teased and taunted them with his blistering speed.
Though sometimes her prose takes on a distinctly purple hue ("His history had the ethereal quality of hoofprints in windblown snow"; "The California sunlight had the pewter cast of a declining season"), Hillenbrand has crafted a delightful book. Wire to wire, Seabiscuit is a winner. Highly recommended. --Sunny Delaney
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