Wild About Horses
Our Timeless Passion for the Horse
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- USD 12.99
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- USD 12.99
Descripción editorial
National Bestseller ¸ Globe and Mail Bestseller
More than any other creature, the beautiful and spirited horse has shaped the course of human history. To gallop on horseback even once is to understand instantly why humans have been connecting with horses for more than 6,000 years. Thoughtful, lyrical, exhaustively researched and generously illustrated, Wild About Horses illuminates and chronicles the ancient, powerful and mystical bond between horses and humans.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scanlan, author of the Canadian horse books Riding High and Big Ben, may be wild about horses, but that doesn't mean that his gushing prose couldn't use some taming. "Time and Space and a Horse are what we had out there," he proclaims of a trek through the Wyoming wilderness. "I hiked up to the ridge... and felt powerful emotions surging in me. (Or was I just out of breath?) I kept thinking of the Shoshone.... Maybe they felt what pilgrims to Chartres or Mecca felt: an overwhelming sense of their own smallness." After wading through obvious observations ("To understand the unique and powerful kinship that humans feel with horses, we must look past mythology to history") and a choppy, uncritical amalgam of oft-retold horse lore, reverential character sketches, simplistic factoids and extensive quotes from other (better) works, such as Stephen Budiansky's The Nature of Horses, this equine elegy reads like an overgrown term paper. "In the world of horses," Scanlan observes, "it might also seem that under the sun there can be nothing new. Or at least nothing more to be written." Readers may well agree--and return instead to the primary sources listed in the extensive bibliography. Photos.
