Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son

...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.

After hearing the author read at a book signing at our local bookstore, I went home and started the book. I could not put it down! A beautifully written, powerful book written with scholarship, conviction and courage. If you have not found this book yet, you must! It is an exceptional read!

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.

Somewhat in the discursive style of W.G. Sebald, the author of this wonderful book wanders easily from a discussion of the role of horses during the ice age to the lyrics of My Olde Kentucky Home, to the way that jockeys grasp their whips, taking in along the way a search for a lost pony and a visit to the Kentucky yearling sales. But this book is more than a ramble through horse country. Running like another theme thoughout are the author's memories, sometimes wildly funny, sometimes poignant, of his sportswriter father and the love that kept them apart. It is this apposition of the discursive and the intensely personal that gives the book its magic and makes John Jeremiah Sullivan a new author to applaud.

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.