Book review - "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand

A deserved best seller this is a wonderful book about an era I had zero knowledge about. American history books always seem to have this advantage because the gaps between success and failure are so huge - when America go corrupt and shonky, they really go corrupt and shonky. Hillenbrand has a real genius for zeroing in on the telling anecdote - like the jockeys who used tape worm to lose weight or put on sweat suits and climbed in the pile of horse manure outside the Tijuana racetrack (all the jockey stuff is gold). F Scott Fitzgerald once said there were no second acts in American lives but all the main characters in this have second acts - Red Pollard the jockey, Tom Smith the trainer and Charles Howard the millionaire owner (recovering from the death of his son) - even Seabiscuit (who like all champion race horses was a show pony who thrived on adulation). I thought it did get a bit bogged down chatting about different horses and stuff about track details and soggy hooves - I know it had to be in the book and horsey people will love it, but I preferred the human detail. Aussie connection: George Woolf, who took over riding Seabiscuit when Pollard was injured, used a saddle that used to belong to Phar Lap.