Dark Horse: Unraveling the Mystery of Nearctic

Rating:
Summary: Where's the REAL Mystery Here?
Review: I was amazed to learn that foals "are born blind, and it generally takes two days for their eyesight to develop fully." (Dark Horse, page 122). I have bred and foaled out both Arabians and Thoroughbreds, and never (ever) had a "blind" foal. Interesting. Maybe I just failed to notice the poor things running into walls and trees. With a serious inaccuracy such as this, one must take this entire book with a grain of salt!
There are numerous editing errors that ultimately detract from the narrative. A disappointment overall.

Rating:
Summary: Dark Horse: Neartic
Review: I was introduced to the intriguing world of racing by two terrific writers: Dick Francis and Muriel Lennox. The real world Ms Lennox describes is even more fascinating. Her books are an easy, fast read packed with information.

I loved reading Dark Horse even more than Ms Lennox's first book, Northern Dancer. For the first time, I really understood how racing bloodlines work. Even better, I got caught up in the history of racing through all the aristocratic drinkers and gamblers to early Scots racing their shaggy ponies. It's much more respectable today!

All in all, Dark Horse is one of those books you can't put down. I give it 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning
Review: Muriel Lennox has once again captured the essence of the horse in her stunning biography of Nearctic. As always , her writing is clear, concise and colourful. Her in deapth study of such a magnificant horse moved me deeply. I look forward to her next books. Karin Ucci

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing embarrassment
Review: This is without question the worst book for which I have ever paid money. The subtitle is "Unraveling the Mystery of Nearctic," but there's precious little mystery established, explored, or solved. The closest Lennox comes to even formulating any mystery is when she asks, "what happened to Nearctic?" in the context of wondering why the horse wasn't a candidate for Canada's Queen's Plate race. The answer (eventually) is "not that much." Then Lennox introduces Val d'Argent, her own Thoroughbred and himself a descendant of Nearctic, and wonders if "knowing more about Nearctic might help me with my horse," which was apparently a handful. "While I was at it," she says, "I would also clear up the mystery of Nearctic's disappearance during the first half of his three year-old year." Now, that's the closest that she comes to explaining what the big mystery is. Some 200 pages later, long after the question has been posed and forgotten, buried under mounds of accumulated minutiae that have nothing to do with the actual horse, the answer appears (...) And Val d'Argent? She mentions him again in the acknowledgements at the back of the book. Val d'Argent is just one of the many topics introduced and then abandoned over 261 pages. The book raises far more questions than it answers, questions like, "What does that have to do with anything?"; "Why is she writing eight pages about a character who never appears again and was only tangentially involved with Nearctic's story anyway?"; and "When is she going to talk about the horse?"

A bigger mystery than how Nearctic spent the spring of 1957 is why Lennox lionizes one of his trainers and smears the others as incompetent or worse. Her own evidence doesn't support her conclusion that Pete McCann, the horse's first trainer, was more interested in or able to advance the horse's welfare than the others, Horatio Luro and C.W. Shaw. She goes out of her way to paint McCann as a dedicated, patient, meticulous horseman devoted to his charge's mental and physical well-being, but the facts don't bear that out. For example, in July, 1957, Luro entered Nearctic in his first two races of the year. Apparently still suffering from the quarter crack which had appeared 6 months earlier, the horse lost both races. After the two losses he was sent to McCann, who promptly started him 3 times in August alone, with the first of those starts coming just two weeks after he last started for Luro, whom Lennox excoriates for running the horse with a quarter crack. Well, that crack didn't heal in the two weeks that McCann had him. In any case, the "musical trainers" aspect of Nearctic's career is something with which Lennox has a big problem. The horse was constantly bounced from one trainer to another. But nowhere, and I mean nowhere, in the book does Lennox find anyone on whom to pin the blame for this admittedly bizarre and wrong-headed approach. Some mysterious "they" entity seems to have been in charge of Nearctic's career. E.P. Taylor owned him. McCann, Shaw, and Luro trained him. Joe Thomas managed Taylor's racing stable. If none of these guys are THEY, then just who is?

Dark Horse is a frustrating experience for all the reasons above and then some. Even if it was beautifully told and lucidly written (it's not), the shockingly incompetent application of punctuation, spelling, grammar, and syntax make it virtually unreadable. After just 5 pages I broke out a highlighter and started making corrections like a grade school teacher. The book reads like a rough draft. Commas are applied randomly, possibly in the hope that the law of averages will result in at least some applications being correct. They are used incorrectly, then correctly, then incorrectly again in the space of a single paragraph. The proofreaders seem to have been ignorant of the most basic rules governing capitalization. Page 176 contains this sentence: "It simply became obscured by the growing number of people he delegated to run the myriad of enterprises he had either begun and left or fixed and left." Yeah, the whole sentence (...), but let's just stick with "myriad of" for now. There's no such thing as "a myriad of." It's just MYRIAD. MYRIAD enterprises. Not "a myriad of" them. Run-on sentences? Incomplete sentences? It's all there, along with utter ignorance of how to use semi-colons, colons, and even periods, to say nothing of how to punctuate a quote within a quote. Here's a typical example: "I was, discouraged." These kiddie school mistakes happen over and over, page after page. They're not typos. They're a way of life.

No reasonable person who sees the gross sloppiness and indifference to detail in this book's mechanics would believe a word of what is presented as fact in its content. (...) PLEASE do not buy this book. It is an absolute embarrassment. It's a failure of technique, of content, and of execution. I read "Northern Dancer: The Legend and His Legacy," Lennox's paean to Nearctic's greatest son, and it was nothing like this. If you buy Dark Horse thinking that it will be anything like Northern Dancer, you will be horribly disappointed.