The near-perfect vehicle to recapture the mania, Seabiscuit’s saga contains the elements of not one but several dark-horse stories: an owner who’d never owned a horse of note, a trainer with no pedigree and a jockey on a downward slide to anonymity. Best of all, there was the runty little mud-colored horse that everyone else had given up on. By the time this book hits its climax–the 1938 match race between Seabiscuit and Triple Crown winner War Admiral in what’s called the greatest horse race of all time–your only question is not why so many people loved horse racing but why they stopped.
That, unfortunately, is one of the few questions Hillenbrand fails to answer. Otherwise she is encyclopedically thorough, sometimes too much so. Only a racing junkie could appreciate her furlong- by-furlong approach to nearly every one of her equine hero’s contests. Worse, she occasionally flirts with “Horse Whis-perer” gush when writing about the principals in her tale. Taciturn trainer Tom Smith, for example, “had cultivated an almost mystical communion with horses.” But just as often she finds the perfect sentence to pin her subjects to the page. Smith, she writes, “had a colorless translucence about him that made him seem as if he were in the earliest stages of progressive invisibility.”
Flaws and all, “Seabiscuit” is an arresting debut. Perhaps because she herself suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, she has tremendous, but never cloying, empathy for the damaged horses and jockeys who stoically accepted pain as part of their routine. But what chiefly distinguishes this account is the straightforward pleasure Hillenbrand takes in the accomplishments of her heroes, two-footed and four-footed alike. A track writer by profession, she plainly loves the world she writes about.
