Buy Seabiscuit here from Amazon.com, and I get 5% of the purchase price! Speaking of Amazon.com, this is the best-reviewed book I have ever seen on that site. It's got 586 reviews as of November 27, 2004, a 5-star average, and of those 586 reviews, 507 are 5-star. Going from the other end, there are only 14 reviews lower than 3-stars, and most of those are completely incoherent haters. You get the idea; people fricking love this book. I don't have a star system, but I do have numbers. Lots of them.

(I'd have given Seabiscuit 4 stars, using the Amazon.com scoring system, despite my nitpicks.)

Seabiscuit
Plot: 9
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/6
Characters: 9
Fun Factor: 7
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 7.5

(Click here to see these categories explained.)

Even though this book is mostly non-fiction (The author clearly took some creative license at times, when we get total insight into the thoughts of various characters, motivations and thoughts of the horses in the races, etc.) I'm using my usual novel rating system, since Seabiscuit reads like a really good novel. In fact it definitely falls under the "truth is stranger than fiction" heading, since you wouldn't believe half the plot twists in this tale if they weren't true.

Seabiscuit is the most unlikely and improbable of heroes, his jockeys are amazing characters, his owner is bombastic and enjoyable, and his taciturn and evasive trainer is amazing. Everything comes alive in this story, especially the horse and the races, and even for someone like myself who doesn't much like horses or care about horseracing, it was frequently thrilling. Thrilling in large part because there are set backs and crushing defeats and injuries, both to the horses and his riders. Seabiscuit was always the underdog, scratching to get a foot in the door, handicapped the most heavily of any horse of his day (made to carry more weight in races), a West Coast horse disrespected by the old boys club of Eastern Racing. His great rival of the time was Man of War, a horse who was everything Biscuit was not; huge, graceful, powerful, of a noble pedigree, trained by the most famous trainer in horse racing, and loved by the establishment. When they finally have their showdown, after numerous cancellations, injuries, weather delays, and more, it's everything the reader has been hoping for.

I highly recommend this title, though my praise is a bit less-glowing than that of many of the aforementioned Amazon.com reviewers.

Plot: 9
As I said earlier, you wouldn't believe any of this if it weren't true.  The highs, the lows, the underdog stories, and twists and turns.  It's an amazing story, and it's written like a novel, with the tension building up to big races, surprising disasters, great triumphs, and so on. It's about the best non fiction page-turner I can imagine.

Concept: 7
Hard to rate this one; I mean it's a biography of a horse who did some amazing things, but since I'd never read a book like it or a book set in the era and focused on this topic, it seemed very original to me.

Writing Quality/Flow: 7/7
Hillenbrand is apparently a great researcher and she's packed this book with an incredible amount of information and detail. It's never written brilliantly, but the information is presented clearly and in logical order, and while there was frequently more info than I really needed, that will vary from reader to reader, so I can't mark her down too much for giving me more than I wanted.

Characters: 9
The plot and characters are what makes this story, and it's hard to say which are better. The plot has more twists and turns than the last five novels I've read, and the characters are as vivid and interesting as any I've ever read in fiction. Yes, I keep comparing this book to a novel. Take the hint. 

Fun Factor: 7
It's almost too gripping and exciting and dramatic to be "fun," but I can't give it a low score on this count; not as much as I enjoyed reading most of it.

Page Turner: 6
This score is somewhat depressed by the length and depth of the book. While various individual races and events are enormously tense and intriguing and exciting, there are lots of other places where we get ten or fifteen pages about Red's (the main jockey) latest career-threatening injury, or five more pages on the latest tactics Seabiscuit's trainer is using to keep the press from watching him work out, and so on. None of it is bad on its own, but when the same themes and scenes are detailed multiple times throughout the book, they do start to get old.

Also, the fact that I never read more than two or three chapters at once, and frequently went several days between reading any of the book at all, has to factor in here.

Re-readability: 5
The only low score, and it's a debatable one. I've got no real desire to ever read the book again, and I feel like I know all I'll ever need to know about Seabiscuit and the humans in his life. Other readers might disagree, and since I'm not totally sick of the whole subject after reading about it, I'm not going to give this book a low score in this ranking.

Overall: 8.5
I debated this one a lot, and almost went down to a 7 or 7.5, before I remembered how much I enjoyed most of the book. I'm a pretty nitpicky and critical reader, and I tend to remember the problems and low points in a work, more than the highlights, so it's no real surprise that the boring stretches and excesses of familiar information contained in Seabiscuit are popping into my mind as I score this review.  It doesn't take much effort to remember the good stuff though, and while most of this score is based on the amazing real life events that the book details, I have to give Seabiscuit credit for all of the research that went into unearthing those facts, even as I take some points away for the various imperfections in the presentation.

As many of the Amazon.com reviews said, you really should read this book, and you don't need to have any interest in horses or horse racing to appreciate it. I certainly didn't care about either of those topics going in, and while I still don't have any interest in them afterwards, I enjoyed learning more about them in the meantime.

December 17, 2004

Reader mail!

First up, here's Caaroid, who wrote in about yesterday's Seabiscuit review. He said, in part:

My goodness, I cannot even bring myself to read your review of a book on a racehorse. I just can't. I cannot find a topic potentially more borring than that one. Maybe it's because the movie "Horse whisperer" was one of the worst experiences in my life, maybe it's because my GF is obsessed with horses, I don't know, but for some reason, reading about a racehorse...
I did check your scores, and it does seem to be a good book. Damn prejudices, see what they do to you? I'll loose out on that one :(

It's a valid point; many people have absolutely no interest whatsoever in horses or horse racing. I enjoy watching a horse race, or at least the last 30 seconds of it, when the announcer thunders, "And down the stretch they come!" and you can watch the equines trampling along, neck and neck, while the crowd screams madly.  I never care who wins, but the sheer athletic spectacle of it is exciting... for 30 seconds. I pay no attention to the sport other than that, though.

As for Seabiscuit, the author, Laura Hillenbrand, researched the topic enough to produce a long magazine article on the horse and his associated humans. It was on the strength of the article that she got a book deal and the funding to continue her research and to produce the book itself. Luckily for us, the article is now available online, and in fact I read it several years ago, all the while thinking, "I'll never read this whole long article about an old racehorse." I did though, and wanted to read more about it when I finished the article, which put the idea of someday reading the book into my head. And I'm glad I eventually did so.

Ms. Hillenbrand's article on Seabiscuit first appeared in The Backstretch magazine and won Ms. Hillenbrand the 1998 Eclipse Award for magazine writing.