![]() ![]() Even the just-published Funny Cide: How a Horse, a Trainer, a Jockey, and a Bunch of High School Buddies Took on the Sheiks and Bluebloods … and Won!, ghosted by veteran sportswriter Sally Jenkins and reportedly auctioned for a million dollars, focuses more on the personalities-the upstate yahoos who lucked into ownership of America’s favorite nutless New Yorker-than on the pony. In them, racing isn’t itself of intrinsic interest but becomes a vehicle for exploring oneself. The racing books flooding the market today are by contrast more self-consciously literary and offer a return to the memoir fever of a few years back. ![]() They added to a genre that had its own rules yet was addressing an adult nonfiction reader, and they genuflected before the greats of the past, from Red Smith to Joe Palmer. ![]() Classics of the turf writer’s bookshelf-William Nack’s Big Red of Meadow Stable: Secretariat, the Making of a Champion (1975), William Surface’s masterful The Track: A Day in the Life of Belmont Park (1976), Jane Schwartz’s Ruffian: Burning From the Start (1991)-were penned with a keen knowledge of the long pedigree of the sport and its scribes. ![]() These books and others that have appeared since Seabiscuit stormed the best-sellers list differ markedly from the occasional gem of racing literature that readers might have encountered back when Secretariat was still the king. ![]()
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