Customer Reviews

Laughing in the Hills (A Hungry Mind Find)

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3 star:		(1)
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I'm not even finished with this book yet, but I got online to see what kind of response it has received. I'm staggered to see it is not ranked higher and had only a few reviews.

This is one of those books where every page brings insights so painful, or so beautiful, I shake my head in amazement. I'm reading it slowly, lovingly, and I'll tell all my friends about it.

I'm a writer, and have written a novel about horse racing. I've explored this same territory. I almost wish I'd written this book. It is filled with truth and sadness and many, many fine portraits of the people that hang around on the backside of the track.

This guy is a very honest type of writer who sets aside his ego to get at the truth.

The book tells the story of the author's attempt to make a go of professional handicapping, but he spends a lot of time on the backstretch getting to know the people and the horses.

There is the backstretch as your trainer describes it to you ("well-oiled machine operating at peak efficiency"), and the backstretch as Barich paints it (loosely collected ragtag assortment of people and horses trying to stay afloat). Even though luck is hard to come by for many of the characters in the book, they have an earnest dignity as Bill Barich depicts them, and love and respect for the animals is predominant.

If you like racing you will like this book; if you don't like racing or are indifferent to it, you will probably like the book anyway.

This book was listed by Amazon.com as one of the 10 Best Sports Books of the 20th Century. It was also chosen by Sports Illustrated as one of the top 100 sports books of all-time.

This unusual and beautifully written work gets right to the heart of its topics. OK, I happen to love racing and fine horses, appreciate Florentine art and culture, and enjoy fly fishing, but I believe "Laughing in the Hills" would appeal to all who enjoy good writing. I have read this book a few times since first discovering it, and have shared it with friends as well.

After I read Barich's New Yorker essay "At the Fountain," I (A) gave a copy to every one of my friends, and (B) pilgramiged to read and know the other published work of this amazing author.
'Laughing in the Hills' could have been about how beans are canned, and it would still be a classic. This book is in a class with the best of Constantine, Auster, and Hardy - and they should consider THEMselves lucky to be compared with Barich.

"Laughing in the Hills" was born out of loss, which Bill Barich illustrates at the inception of his 1978 work, "For me it did not begin with horses. They came later, after a phone call and a simple statement of fact: Your mother has cancer."

Lost and full of reprieve, Barich turns to the unlikeliest of cathedrals for inspiration in his time of mourning: the racetrack. The connection as to why or what made him turn to the track is underdeveloped, but this matters little. What does matter is Barich's ability to unveil with an adept and philosophical eye the intricacies and pulse of life at the track.

The track for Barich becomes an insular world where he turns "to get past the sadness." It provides a framework, a construction, within which he can repair the tatters of his grief-filled life, temporarily shattered by the loss and death of his mother. The book arrives at a mystical solution to that pain in that it is not until Barich abandons constructions and narratives all together that his own enlightenment becomes possible.

Barich is the consummate Renaissance man, as well versed in the history of thoroughbred horseracing, as philosophy, or the offerings of Florence's Uffizi Gallery. And it is wearing these multiple hats of the artist, philosopher, and sportsman that Barich expresses a personal fear that a moral and cultural decay was upon him and his fellow man in the late `70's. And it was out of this time that Barich feared television would emerge as the preferred medium of entertainment, and in so doing become a murderer of culture, creating a time of "flattened perceptions and a cathodal substratum too insubstantial to support human life."

It is out of this fear that Barich turns to art, more particularly writing and other modes of entertainment, rather than television, in a desperate search for his own salvation. But why out of all places turn to the racetrack? Why to a place popularly believed to be the playground of the ill-repute? "The track, it seemed, was just like life, unjust and aleatory," Barich argues.

In the track, Barich found the ultimate metaphor for life, the quintessential subject for his pen. A framework for his philosophy. The place to play out two parallel journeys.

The narrative thrust of "Laughing in the Hills" is concerned with Barich's evolving relationship with the racetrack (and thus with life) in all its aleatory splendor, his attempts to wrest life's uncertainty under his control, and his ultimate acceptance of the nature of chance.

It is in Barich's ultimate concession to chance that the beauty of the book radiates.

The track is, above all, a home for people. For characters. And it is with the acute eye of a seasoned writer that Barich is able to carve out for every person he encounters from stable groom to bar fly, their rightful claim on the stage of life.

In "Laughing in the Hills" we are introduced to Arnold Walker, a frequenter of The Turf Club and master weaver of tall tales, Richard Labarr, the "racetrack gypsy," John Gibson, the voice of Golden Gate Fields, Headley, the trainer, and many more. Barich, ever the disinterested writer, gives their stories life, realizes their dreams are as real as his own.

In writing about Emery Wienbrenner, "trainer, backstretch bon vivant," Barich speaks of Emery's dream to own a ranch, "He didn't know exactly how the ranch would come to pass, but the vision, as he presented it, was a felt thing, immediately palpable, and when he spoke of it, I could see its dimensions, the split-pine fence and rustic ranch house, and around it snowcapped peaks of granite." Barich renders beautifully both the vulnerability and the coinciding transcendent nature of Weinbrenner's dreams. And lending validity to Emery's dreams lifts up Barich's spirits. It lends freedom to his pain. "I don't know why I was spending so much time with Emery," Barich recounts, "what I'd learn from him. The answer was clear, though. We were both struggling; his confusion resembled my own." And so it is with all the characters in "Laughing in the Hills". They are companions as well as buoys in Barich's own struggle for meaning.

People are not the only redeemer for Barich. He also finds understanding in horses and the "aleatory" nature in which they compete. Barich compares his love for thoroughbred horses to the love which another character in the book shares for trout fishing, when he describes the man as having "optimism" in his "pursuit of slippery creatures, the desire to connect with forces beyond [his] control."

Barich's love of horses is philosophical. Horse racing he points out is much like time- a human construct that serves a functional purpose. In the case of horse racing, its first purpose is to be enjoyable. But we are reminded at the end of every race that the race itself was ephemeral, a two minute relish. A man-made creation. "I watched him pass the finish line and watched the pattern dissolve," writes Barich of that moment of finality, when the horses stop at varying times at speeds, that moment just beyond when the last sentence of the story has been written, and order is again relinquished and chaos prevails.

In "Laughing In The Hills" Barich also details his own attempt to wrestle the myriad of stories, daily races, and Sanskrit-like qualities of "The Daily Racing Form" under his predictive methods.

Barich first took to Golden Gate Fields with a stack of money that he planned to grow across the season during which he was writing his book. But reality refused to conform to his plan. About halfway through the season, Barich switched his approach when his original system proved inadequate. The new system was simply a more leveraged form of his prior one, in that he now just bet less frequently, but with bigger size and longer odds.

Barich's whole foray into the world of gambling serves a narrative and philosophical purpose beyond just elucidating one more aspect of track life. Chaos and order, Barich phrases, is "a shifting notion, a matter of perspective." Gamblers faithfully, and perhaps blindly, impose order on chaos as a way to justify their systems. We lend order to chaos for excitement. We lend order to chaos because we like stories. Because we like things to end happily. Because we want our predictions and insights validated.

But mothers die, and horses that are supposed to win don't, and horse that are unflappable prove duds. Such is life. It is easy to say such things, but we always allow ourselves to believe the opposite. It is human nature. It is why the house always wins. But that is where gambling serves a purpose. It leads, always, to one of two places: bankruptcy or to a refinement of thinking.

Barich realized that his original system would have led him only to bankruptcy, so he tweaked it until he arrived at what he thought was a more infallible one. Had he not done this he would have lost his entire stack. And in life, in the absence of unrepeatable luck, it is these countless iterations of refinement that are necessary to make a system able to float. Or perhaps the bettor to decide that he or she should not gamble.

Gambling can lead a gambler, although rarely, to a system so refined that it more than floats, and is able to strip the house of its precious edge. But the ultimate value of the refinement is not in the end itself, but rather the journey, the rethinking, the enlightenment that such a process provides. For Barich, he resolves to cease gambling, with his small, beginning stack almost fifty percent down. But it is a small price to pay for that which he learned along the way about the nature of chance, life, and the wings that would lift him from the weight of his depression.

At the end of the book the parallel journeys become one, the metaphor yet again made explicit, the solution to Barich's pain found:

"I had another bourbon, and thought how thoroughbreds take us away. When I was in touch with them I felt...every neuron in my body, transforming me into a long synapse, bit of energy blowing apart...All connections are tenuous. I knew what was happening then. I was letting go of sadness, letting go of my mother. Living and dying; winning and losing: I sat on the stool...suddenly permeated by all the emotions I had been blocking out. Nothing abides; no cause for alarm."

Barich absorbed all the winning and losing from a season at the track into a personal philosophy on dealing with loss. Barich, by engaging himself back into life and contemplating its aleatory nature, is able to hand over reins of his own life to the Mother Chance, as well as to not fear the results such a concession will bring. Barich demonstrates in "Laughing in the Hills" that if we are able to accept chance's influence on the daily happenings of life (the roll of chance in every horserace), we can be lifted from our pain and taken away to a happier place.

This book gives a very well written view into the day to day world of horse racing, only from behind the scenes with the common folks and common horses. It is one mans' summer adventure after a family tragedy to live the racing from betting to finding out all the Sport of Kings offered. The thoughts of the author as he went from day to day in this world was educational, calming, and realistic - including non-exciting. If you're looking for action, read "Seabisquit" or other more fast paced books about this area. If you're looking for the deep thoughts about the people, places, and things, you've found a winner. Cash it in!

Back in the 1970s, journalist Bill Barich's mother died after a long, terrible battle with cancer. Barich sought solace by betting at his local racetrack - Golden Gate Fields - in the San Francisco Bay area. Laughing in the Hills is Barich's account of his year at the track.

There is a lot to like in this book. Barich introduces the reader to the interesting characters he met at the track - all are people who don't quite fit in the nine-to-five world. Another plus is that the reader gets some inside knowledge of the horse racing world.

Predictably, given that Barich's time at the track came after his mother's death, the book has a very sad undertone. Clearly, Barich was trying to find himself. Consider this passage about what serious gamblers do with their winnings:
"Their attitude toward money differed from most people's. Millions passed through the pari-mutuel windows every day and was rerouted in part, but the gypsies knew that no one's life was ever changed. You could be ahead for a day, two days, a week, an entire meet, but sooner or later you lost" (p. 142).

A sub-plot concerns the semester that Barich spend in Florence, Italy as a college student. He often diverts his narrative with material on his Italian experiences and on Italian history. I thought that this was only marginally successful. The Italian material is fairly interesting, but does not "mesh" well with the rest of the book.

Laughing in the Hills is a good book, but I think that my expectations were too high. I first heard of the book when I saw it listed in Sports Illustrated's ranking of the top 100 sports books of all time, so my hopes were high. While I'm glad that I read it, I think that it suffers from too many dead spots and from a lack of focus. Still, it's worth a look.

This book although a little dated is very informative about the backside of racing. The characters are interestings and artfuly described. Anyone who loves horses and racing should read this book
Tennessee guy

WHAT a wonderful world Barich portrays in this book. HOW we all took it for granted! Although it revolves around the author's momentary fervor (handicap fever!) with the racetrack and its inhabitants (both human and animal), as the narrative develops we are wrapped in a security blanket made out of time and place. Sure there was a cold war but it was getting warmer; yes the economy was struggling but so what? the horses were running, weren't they?

But this is really the story of a different sort of race, the sometimes faulty, sometimes urgent, always mysterious journey of life. Barich went to the track in search of much more than a winning ticket; he was attempting to deal with the untimely death of his mother, and his own mortality that surreptitiously engulfs a child, no matter what age, at the death of a parent. The stories that unfolded before him, frustrated and angry, dedicated and often hopeless, intermittently colored by a wild sort of joy and replete with the hope of defeating that which ultimately cannot be defeated, are what fill this book.

The smallest and least significant person (as judged by the world at large) becomes the portrait hung at the center of a gallery filled with exquisite portraits. These humans are so likable (even lovable), these horses so brilliant (no matter how well they perform), we can't take our eyes away from the page. Barich also brings us along as he reminisces about his adventures in Florence during his college career and just as beautifully renders his memories into landscapes we can actually SEE, smell, even taste. This is a book about human discovery, frailty, courage and, ultimately, HOPE.

Barich left the track and its encapsulated world with what he came for. "More often than ever I was happy just to ford the river and climb the hills of the sheep ranch. Someday the model would obtain, the dam would silt up, the cardboard houses would be blown away, and the steelhead would return to the river in great numbers, or to another river of equal importance. Whether or not I saw them return no longer concerned me. They would return. Just this then, to make every world the New World, to approach it with an explorer's sense of wonder"