Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son (Paperback)

~ (Author) "It was in the month of May, three years ago, by a hospital bed in Columbus, Ohio, where my father was recovering from what was..." (more)
Key Phrases: yearling sale, stud book, New York, Triple Crown, Funny Cide (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Horse racing does not lend itself easily to the drama and characters of most sports, because, as the author puts it, "when your Sammy Sosa has four legs, cannot speak, and has, to all appearances, no idea what people are so worked up about, you have to work harder to generate narrative." In his own quest to trace racing's history and capture its urgency, Sullivan, a former Harper's editor, has indeed worked hard but made it look effortless. He has found narrative not in a particular horse but in The Horse—the cultural, literary and biological phenomenon. It would be easy to expect, in this post-Seabiscuit age, a tale of the triumphant underdog, but Sullivan has more reflective pleasures on his mind. He alternates a history of the South, particularly of Lexington, Ky., where he spent time as a child and where much of the American horse-racing industry is concentrated, with a larger cultural and historical examination. His riffs are also unexpectedly hilarious, especially when he takes a gonzo-ish trip to the Kentucky Derby. Running throughout is the story of Sullivan's late father, a longtime sportswriter and dreamer whom the author lovingly, but largely unsentimentally, worships, and whose presence provides a kind of magnetic pull without overwhelming the book. Sullivan, who won a National Magazine Award for the piece on which this book was based, has a fairly liberal approach to structure and pace, but no matter: he has written a history as sweeping as it is personal and whose coherence is made more impressive by its lack of central drama—a book that is, in short, as remarkable as the finest horses it documents.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Sullivan has written a strange amalgam of a book: part personal reminiscence; part bittersweet elegy for his father, sportswriter Mike Sullivan; and part wide-ranging investigation into the history and culture of the horse, particularly the Thoroughbred racehorse. Spurred by his father's recollection of Secretariat's Kentucky Derby victory in 1973, the author devoted two years of intensive reading and travel to understanding the various aspects and allure of Thoroughbred racing. Although he remains in some respects an amateur, communicating what he has learned with an amateur's zeal and certainty, he has learned a great deal. In describing the roles horses have played throughout human history in war and peace and the way Thoroughbreds are bred, sold, trained, and raced today, Sullivan provides vivid detail and, occasionally, penetrating insight. His account of War Emblem's 2002 bid for racing's Triple Crown makes for especially compelling reading. Dennis Dodge
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Picador (March 24, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312423764
• ISBN-13: 978-0312423766
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #548,002 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Master is Born, April 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son (Hardcover)

Here's the long and short of it: John Jeremiah Sullivan, straight out of the gate with BLOOD HORSES, his first book, has written a masterpiece. Mixing conventional memoir, unconventional reportage, and a collage of historical source material about the history of the horse and the horse in history and literature, Sullivan braids apparantly disparate strands into a single narrative of power, delicacy, strangeness, and beauty. And as smart as this book is, as much reading and thinking as Sullivan slips into every page, there is never a moment when the enterprise has even a hint of pretention. This is a function of Sullivan's deep storytelling reserves, his elegant prose, his biting sense of humor (particularly about his own shortcomings), and his huge heart that, like Seabiscuit's own, is preturnaturally large. Sullivan's book is ultimately a moving tribute to his father-a failed poet, a respected sportswriter, and a man Sullivan lost too soon. Sullivan searches high and low for traces of him, a search that yields this book, one of the most moving and accomplished in recent memory, a book built to last.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People who don't get it..., July 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son (Hardcover)

...shouldn't blame the author. This is a phenomenal book. Blood Horses is partly an experiment in narrative technique. Like most literary experiments, it has its less-than successful moments. There are places where the author's allusions to and quotations from other texts get overwhelming. But the book also contains some of the most amazing pages of flat-out writing I've come across in a long time--about horses, about pain, and about beauty. Given its ambitious scope the structure holds together surprisingly well, and pieces of it are wickedly funny. If you come to it looking for Seabiscuit II, you might find it frustrating and a little disjointed. I came to it looking for a new writer who was trying something different, and I was blown away. This book is destined to become a classic and Sullivan an author to follow. I say discover him before everyone else does.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One man's story about Dad, and a lot of stuff about horses, April 16, 2004

By	Evelyn McHugh (Bergen County, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son (Hardcover)

This is a breath-taking book. I picked it up at the library, thinking it was about race horses. It's not, really. But I'm buying for my own, anyway.

The horses are in there, with tales of Secretariat and War Emblem, horses carrying soldiers to war, hobby-horses, and the bond between humans and horses. But not in the way you expect.

This is a story about a sportswriter father, written by his son. But it's more than that. It's about being at the Keeneland yearling sale on September 10 and 11th 2001. It's about hearing his father's story of the 1973 Triple Crown races and the man as a boy sitting in the press box after a baseball game watching his father interact with his fellow newspapermen. It's about that moment in your life when you first see the human being, not the parent, and coming to terms with it. And a lot of other stuff that is hard to explain but makes perfect sense as you read it. It roams from Woodstock, to 1830's Germany, to the 1800's journal of a Kentucky itinerate well-digger, to the 2003 Belmont Stakes and ends in a way that is a perfect tribute in so many ways you have to have read it for me to explain it.

The last time I was so taken by a book was John Irving's The World According to Garp. But this is real life, and it tastes of it. Buy it if you are interested in horses - or in humans. Or in both.