Books
Such Different Books
TD Thornton on why he wrote “Not by a Long Shot”:
I read a lot of great books about the sport’s champions and iconic figures, but after awhile, it started to dawn on me that very few of those books spoke of the racetrack as I knew it — minimum-wage stable hands busting ice out of frozen water buckets, jockeys who starve themselves to make riding weight, fragile, beautiful horses with immeasurable tenacity. All of these elements keep the industry humming along in unheralded fashion so the highest echelon of the game can bask in the spotlight, yet these people and horses never seem to have a voice. I wanted to give them one.
Jaimy Gordon on her motivation for “Lord of Misrule”:
Of course, I read “Horse Heaven,’’ Jane Smiley’s novel. But the owners in “Horse Heaven’’ are respectable, upper-middle-class people, not like people I used to know on the racetrack.
I hoped I might write a book like Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City.” To me, that’s the best novel about American boxing, and yet it’s about boxing at its absolute bottom end, around Stockton, Calif. That’s what I wanted to do — write a book about horse racing at its low end, in an era considerably before the present moment, and see if there wasn’t an open niche for that.
Such similar urges to storytelling.
More Misrule
John Williams reviews Jaimy Gordon’s racetrack novel:
Lord of Misrule isn’t a chore. It’s more accurate to say that it alternately charms and befuddles. It’s possible to move from deep admiration to deep suspicion of it in the space between paragraphs. It’s wise and flaky. It’s funny intentionally and unintentionally. It begins with a bit of overworked imagery and ends with a great plainspoken sentence.
Odds on the NBA winner collects the Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award?
“Lord of Misrule” is also among the 16 works competing for the Rooster in the Morning News’ annual Tournament of Books, which begins March 7. Tough competition there; “Super Sad True Love Story” is a solid favorite for the title.
The Trouble With Racing
Speculation, allegations, rumor, and hearsay from Jim Squires in his new book, “Headless Horsemen,” reviewed by Ray Kerrison in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr Squires believes steroids were first used in racing in the 1950s. He makes some startling claims about earlier horse-racing champions. He alleges that 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat may have raced on steroids. “There are oldtimers who insist that even the magnificent physical stature of the great Secretariat was not all genetic and his early problem settling mares” — that is, breeding — “may have been a by-product of steroids.”
The allegations continue. Mr. Squires writes: “Denigrators of the late Frank Whiteley [1915-2008], the surly magician who trained Damascus and Ruffian, sincerely believe that his magic came from sniffs of cocaine and say they know people who say they saw Whiteley coming out of the stalls brushing the white dust off his hands.”
Fascinating stuff, as I expect Squires’ commentary on the industry power structure to be when I begin reading the book. More to come …
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Jessica Chapel is a writer, editor, and web producer living in Massachusetts. Railbird is a thoroughbred horse racing blog published since June 2004. More ›
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