Man O' War: A Legend like Lightning Book

I went into this book with lowered expectations, that somehow Ours managed to undershoot.

On the upside, this really is a learned and completed guide to the life and career of Man o' War. Ours' is extremely reliable on every angle of this extraordinary horse. So that's the good part, I now know a lot of things about Man o' War.

The downside is that this is not interesting in itself. This book has no spark, no sense of momentum or personality or narrative. This is compounded by Ours' failings as a writer. The text reads like racing forms stitched together with awkward segues. The racing form feel plays out as "comments overheard at the track" and speed statistics presented in long long lists. Ours actually gets most animated in her prose when she is describing why times varied, how track conditions affected times, post positions, and all the rest of the minutia of track life. Where she is at her weakest is when writing about anything else.

Ours' greatest failing as a writer is her habit of repeating information a couple of times, then again, then again. This is how we get paragraphs like this from p. 203 of my hardcover copy, "Setting sail along the backstretch and discouraging Grier, Red set a brilliant pace, reaching the half mile in :46 3/5 and hammering out six furlongs in 1:10 flat. Saratoga's track record was 1:10 and two. No Travers winner ever had shown such insane early speed." This reads fine until you think about what she is saying there, which is repeating that the horse ran at record speed three times in a row (of course no Travers winner had ever run that fast, because it is a record speed. That is what record means). Moreover, she will repeat that same observation about that race and others at random intervals throughout the rest of the book. Aside from this very irritating echoic habit, Ours is just not very good at deciding what should be interesting to the reader. I laughed outright at page 236 where she seems to get really excited about Windsor, Ontario being SOUTH OF DETROIT and burns up a paragraph describing how strange Canadian geography is.

Overall, this is a book for horse enthusiasts and track people that probably would not have sold or been read so widely if not for the success of Seabiscuit (to support this observation, please note that my copy of this book has 4 cover blurbs, and two are from Hillenbrand and one is from a writer on the Daily Racing Form).