Customer Reviews

Horse Racing

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As I write this review in 2009, there is no contemporary general guide to racing bloodlines from a British perspective, so this book that I bought a long time ago (the eighties or early nineties) remains useful. While there are chapters covering other aspects of racing - the history, the organization, racecourses, trainers, jockeys, statistics and betting - about half the book is devoted to bloodlines. If you're not interested in those, it's difficult to see why you would buy this book. The book was originally published in 1949 but this fourth edition was revised by Miles Napier and published in 1982.

The main chapter deals with the sire lines descending from the three famous foundation stallions, but does not limit itself to the branches of those lines that survived. It discusses some of the branches that did well for a while, telling us about some of the many big-race winners that those branches produced before they ultimately died out. Rather than discuss each branch from beginning to end, the chapter is divided roughly into time zones, so each period of racing history is discussed as a unit. (This made it easy to produce revised editions of the book, though some of the original text could have done with revision; some of the lines that survived until 1949 were extinct long before 1982.) Another useful chapter concerns the female lines, which aren't covered anything like as comprehensively as the sire lines. Rather, the author chose to feature a selection of families, but does explain Bruce Lowe's system based on tap root mares. Plenty of charts are provided, reflecting the text in diagrammatic form.

Even as I read this book the first time around, I realized that looking at bloodlines based purely on father-to-son or mother-to-daughter is inherently unsound, but it doers at least provide an interesting way to tracing the history of the thoroughbred racehorse. Some of the sire lines that were still well-represented in 1982 are now struggling while others are flourishing more strongly than ever, but it will ever be thus. While I was pleased to buy Dynasties, which looks at sire lines from an American perspective, a lot has happened in the past 27 years and a new look at the subject from a British perspective is overdue. Nevertheless, I cannot fault this book for what it is.