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Summary: Seabiscuit
Review: An absolutely awesome book. The story told the life of four main characters and the history of racing. The characters were Howard Shore, Tom Smith, Red Pollard and Seabiscuit. It contains lots of details on every page. It was amazing how the author had Red Pollard and Seabiscuit's lives lived so much alike. Each characters story is very nicely described and attention grabbing. However I thought Seabiscuit's life was the most interesting. Seabiscuit was an offspring of a great racing horse, but he was born a small and timid looking horse. Many hopes were put on him to be the next big winner in the racing world. Things turned dark as the owner saw Seabiscuit as a useless animal. Seabiscuit was then separated from his mother and sold for a low price. He began racing but lost every one of them. Seabiscuit was treated poorly and was constantly shifting from one owner to another. It was not until he met up with Red Pollard a young man who leads the same life as he did. Abandoned by his family, and was the worst jockey. Both of them only knew about losing. Both of them were never given a chance in the world. Both of them had a fiery temper and never wanted to give up. It was then after Red Pollard and Seabiscuit were together, they began to win. Wins after wins, Red Pollard and Seabiscuit were on a roll. However this book is all happy, both Red and biscuit face losses and many put downs. I was surprised how a jockey had to watch his weight. At times Red would eat a lot and sometimes barely nothing, they even force themselves to vomit in order to make themselves lighter. In the beginning I didn't take horse racing as a big deal. I always had thought jockeys made easy money. It was until I read Seabiscuit my views were opened up to a whole new meaning. It made me more interested in horse racing and how hard those horses and jockeys work everyday of their lives. This book also talks about the history of racing. Attention grabbing, page-flipper, this is definitely the book to read.
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Summary: Be an Informed Reader and You'll Enjoy it
Review: Probably one of the best books I've read in a while. Recommended by my son (twenty one), I was thrilled by the action and human drama of Seabiscuit. The writing was like listening to someone telling you a story, kind of the same way it comes across in My Fractured Life or Secret Life of Bees, except with horses. I can't say I expect it is a book everyone "must read." I mean, I loved it. I think most people will love it. But, be an informed reader. It's not like The Da Vinci Code. It's not like Ian Flemming's James Bond books. It's a simple storytelling style like My Fractured Life and Secret Life of Bees. That appeals to me and so I loved it. Seabiscuit is more than the story of a horse, the real appealing thing (to me) is in the storytelling style.
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Summary: Fall in love... Seabiscuit
Review: I absolutly loved this book. The author has a gift to enable the horse to take on the personality of an adorable child. I just fell in love with the horse. The personality of the horse and his relationships just blew me away. This is a must-read! It is much, much better than the movie!I never wanted to book to end! Brilliant!
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Summary: Seabicuit, one of my 2 favorite books I ever read
Review: This book is amazing! My friend told me to read it and I gave in. I didn't want to read a book about a horse! ( I'm a guy). But after reading this book, I truly know what they mean by never judge a book by it's cover. The characters, even the horse, become so real it sucks you in. When a race comes you feel dramatically involved. I am still in awe of how good it is. I don't want to give ay of it away, so I will just say this : IT IS SO GOOD!
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Summary: LONG LIVE THE GREAT HORSE SEABISCUIT
Review: Seabiscuit was a great book. I've never been so caught up on a historical figure. This book didn't tell me just about the horse, it told me everything about that time in the 1930's. I learned about automobiles, how jockeys lose weight, Great Depression, and many other intresting things. I was quite amazed about how such a disfigured horse could be such a perfect horse with the help of such unordinary characters. It really toched me. The three people that helped Seabiscuit are,Charles Howard,Tom Smith, Red Pollard. Charles Howard,who was quite poor and opened an bicycle repair shop, which soon turned to a automobile lot. He made a lot of money with the selling of the automobiles, so he decided he should buy a horse. He bought a few cheap horses who were not very good, but he needed a trainer, he found Tom Smith, an old mustang breaker, who no one really knew that he was such a great trainer. He talked to Seabiscuit, slept next to him every night, he kept Seabiscuit on a special diet, took Seabiscuit at night for special workouts. Seabiscuit only trusted Tom Smith to take care of him.Red Pollard, Seabiscuit's jockey, was skinny and tall for a jockey. He was half-blind in one eye, due to riding one day and getting a piece of rock kicked in his eye. Red never told anyone about this, scared that if he did, they may get hid of him. As a child, his family was very rich, his dad founded a town, and owned a brick factory, a flood washed away everything they had. Red had dreamed of being a jockey, his family sent his away with a family friend to fulfill that dream. That family friend disappered, and Red was left with no money and no where to go. Red tried to earn money boxing with other jockeys, but he wasn't very athletic. He was always reading books, so he was very smart. A few owners asked Red to ride, but he did ok but not good enough to win any money. Tom Smith, spotted Red and thought he had potential. Tom Smith found Seabiscuit one day at a race, he showed Charles Howard, he thought Seabiscuit was great. They bought Seabiscuit for $7, 500. He did good, in 1937, he won the Huntington Beach Handicap, a big race back then.Later, he was beaten by a nose in the Santa Anita Handicap by Rosemount, a great horse. After that loss, he went on a winning streak, winning 10 out of 11 races. He won five handicaps. He was voted champion older horse and he was the leading money-earning thoroughbred in 1937. His record for the year: 11 wins in 15 starts that's 168,580 dollars. Seabiscuit beat War Admiral, the best horse at the time. That was to be considered as the biggest horse race at the time. Seabiscuit continued to ride for two more years, continously winning, then retired after he became a bit weak. Seven years after he retired, he died. Everyone had heard of Seabiscuit, even I, before I had heard about the book or movie. Making a movie and book out of it was a great idea, I was inspired by Seabiscuit, really. I loved the book, even though the words were heard to understand, and they went on forever about every little thing, it was good.
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Summary: One of the best books I've read in a long time
Review: I'm not usually a big fan of the non-fiction books, but this is one startling exception. Being from the Bluegrass State, I've always heard about the great horses like Man O' War and Secretariat, but I didn't know nearly as much about Seabiscuit. The way Hillenbrand writes about this horse is absolutely amazing. You forget you're reading about a horse at all because her descriptions and the way she talks about Seabiscuit make you forget she's writing about an animal. This is easily one of the best books I've read in quite some time mainly just because it feels as though it's a throwback. It's almost as if you're in the grandstands for one of Seabiscuits races. The stories of the human counterparts are intersting as well, but you can tell the real passion lies with the horse itself. Seabiscuit was an amazing horse and this is a very worthy book about his remarkable life and racing career.
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Summary: Rooting For the Underdog.
Review: Several pages into, SEABISCUIT, I absolutely fell in love with the book. I learned so much about the history of racing, about Howard Shore, Tom Smith, George Woolf, and Red Pollard. Granted the book is a bit slow to read at first and the story splits back and forth between four different lives. However, everything comes together to tell the fascinating story of how Seabiscuit became the most loved horse in America. I enjoyed the way the start of the book deals with the lives of four different creatures: one chapter is about Howard Shore, another Tom Smith, another Red Pollard, and another Seabiscuit. I found it fascinating how these four very different lives came together to form such a meaningful story. To me, it illustrates the ways that Providence works. The book is also a piece of non-fiction, but the story almost reads like a novel. Descriptions of events are very detailed, vivid, and real. Looking over the sources at the end of the book, I do not doubt the research Ms. Hillenbrand put forth and find the tone to be a testament to her skills as a writer. SEABISCUIT is a grand story about a grand horse. There will be some who simply won't like the book, but you shouldn't let that keep you from reading it yourself. "So long, Charley."
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Summary: Breathless and dubious
Review: Where to begin? About ten pages in, I began to smell a rat. This work claims to be nonfiction, but I'm not so sure. The style of reporting at the time was to overhype. Everyone knows this, but instead of a turning a jaundiced eye, Ms. Hillebrand decided to adopt this practice as her own. There seems to be no tidbit about Seabiscuit reported at the time that she is prepared to disbelieve. Look at how many things in the bibliography are marked "SB" -- which, she explains, is the designation she uses for newspaper clippings which have no date or source attribution. If she could corraborate these through another source, then why not list the other source? She crows, in the Acknowledgements, about finding many cases where the facts she was researching were confirmed by multiple witnesses. Someone please tell the author this is called "corraborating evidence", and it is what you rely on when writing a historical account. Not faded overhyped singleton news clippings of unknown origin, which are quoted from oh so often without the slightest bit of skepticism. (For fun, swing on over to snopes dot com and do a search for "Seabiscuit".) There are so many little details -- facial expressions, sighs, crowd reactions -- that are "just so", obviously written to thrill rather than inform, and it's quite impossible to believe that any historical research method short of a time machine could possibly reveal them. And these tidbits are always presented in such a way as to make Seabiscuit's rise more dramatic, trainer Smith more mysterious, jockey Pollard more unlikely. The popularity of this book and its accompanying movie have effectively clouded the waters, so we'll probably never know the true story of Seabiscuit. Ms. Hillenbrand has launched an effective campaign towards his establishment as a fairy tale, however.
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Summary: great descriptions of races!!
Review: This book had a subject matter that I am very familiar with which probably helped me appreciate it more. I found it very interesting. The detailed descriptions of races had me on the edge of my seat as if I were riding 'the biscuit' myself. It also gave a very interesting look to the actions that go on behind the scenes of horse racing. I recommend it for anyone who is interested in the biscuit's life or just horse racing in general. Although most terms are explained in footnotes, it still may be a little hard to understand for someone who knows little or nothing about racing.
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Summary: Deserves All the Praise
Review: I've been hesitant to read non-fiction after far too many encounters with boring accounts of history throughout high school and college, but I tried this one and LOVED it. It was so exciting--not at all like reading a textbook. One of the best things about Hillenbrand is that she helped make some of the details of racing understandable but at the same time she didn't talk down to the reader either. She seamlessly provided information about the era while telling the story of Howard, Smith, Pollard and Seabiscuit. It certainly lives up to all the hype.
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