Spring Reading
This spring* brings a bounty of books with ties to horse racing, and only one is about the 12th Triple Crown winner — Joe Drape’s American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise, which comes out on April 26. If this biography by a New York Times writer of the first horse to sweep the American classics in 37 years isn’t definitive, it’s still the book anyone else who tries to write about American Pharoah will have to cite.
Two more new releases are set for April 26 — Eliza McGraw’s Here Comes Exterminator! tells the story of the longshot winner of the 1918 Kentucky Derby. The author’s history with the great horse goes deep:
My affection and reverence for Exterminator started when I read Mildred Mastin Pace’s 1955 “Old Bones, the Wonder Horse†as a child. I became re-interested with his story when I was writing an article about cavalry horses in World War I, and saw contemporary headlines. Now, I’ve become obsessed, and spend hours at the Library of Congress and the National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Va., leafing through old copies of the Thoroughbred Records from the 1920s. Last year, my preoccupation took me to Pennsylvania, to visit Garrett and Muriel McDaniel. Garrett is Henry McDaniel’s great-nephew. “These were Uncle Henry’s,†he told me, handing over a worn pair of binoculars. They felt heavy and cool in my hand, and I imagined the thrill McDaniel felt as he watched Exterminator flash around the track.
McGraw writes more about Exterminator and her research on Raceday 360.
For the more literary-minded, there’s The Sport of Kings, the second novel by Hemingway/PEN award finalist C.E. Morgan. Set on a breeding farm owned by a powerful Kentucky family, centered on a horse named Hellsmouth, it’s described by the publisher as “an unflinching portrait of lives cast in shadow by the enduring legacy of slavery.” (Put it on the shelf next to Lord of Misrule.) You can read an excerpt on the publisher’s website.
The Legend of Zippy Chippy: Life Lessons from Horse Racing’s Most Lovable Loser, by humorist William Thomas, is in bookstores (and ready to ship from Amazon) today. There’s been some good press around this book and the Zippy Chippy story, such as this delightful New York Post feature. Zippy’s enjoying a happy retirement at Old Friends’ Cabin Creek farm.
If you’re interested in the intersection of horse racing and tech, or the collision of social media and the Zenyatta fandom, Holly Kruse’s Off-Track and Online: The Networked Spaces of Horse Racing has you covered. Kruse approaches an “overlooked” industry and its participants as a researcher and racing fan, a compelling mix for an academic title that opens with the invention of the totalizator and tries to impress on readers the importance of “understanding age, gender, class, race, and geography in broader social contexts.”
It might seem an odd pairing, but My Adventures with Your Money can easily be read alongside Kruse’s book as a tale of finding innovative — and not always legal — ways to use new technologies. Published last fall (making it the * in this round-up), T.D. Thornton’s history of con man George Graham Rice fits our cultural moment (and maybe this election season). A swindler, a grifter, a hustler who couldn’t stop hustling, Rice got his start selling tout sheets and manipulating the tote, then bounced in and out of prison for luring suckers into bad investments in the go-go days of 1920s Wall Street (he was also a “pioneer of sex appeal” in marketing). Rice preyed on the greedy and naive and relished it — if you like to root for charismatic anti-heroes (Walter White, Donald Trump), or if you’re fascinated by how such people entice dupes into their schemes, you’ll probably get a kick out of his story.
