Building Show Jumps Book

After having read about half of the Thoroughbred Legends series, I decided I'd go right to the end and read the last book in the series. I wanted to see if I could notice a trailing off of the quality of writing. I did not find this. Instead, I found one of the more interestingly written volumes in the series. Part of the reason for this is the author, Edward Bowan, who has written some of the other volumes in the series that I thought were well done. Part is because of the subject, Bold Ruler, a horse with a somewhat spotty record at racing but a golden record at stud. This is quite different than most of the other subjects in this series, and allowed the author to tell the story in a different way. The typical way these stories are told are to cover in order the breeders, owners, horse lineage, trainers, racing record, and stud record. This one adjusted this a bit, covering more of the history of the owners/breeders than most. Much of this tilt might well be because the owners/breeders were of the thoroughbred "royalty", old money owners with a long and well documented history. There was a lot of story here. The racing story was also interesting in that, unlike many of the other horses in the series, Bold Ruler had some difficulties along the way and was inconsistent. That helped make the story more interesting. The final chapters, on the results of the many, many breedings Bold Ruler took part in, began to read like those parts of the Bible where you see a long line of "begats". You read about dozens of off-spring in this last chapter, and it runs together. Overall, this was one of the better books in the series.