Horse Memoir

In the late 1980s, a spectacular three-year-old female racehorse named Winning Colors was being groomed for success under her famous Hollywood trainer D. Wayne Lukas and the billionaire owner of the San Diego Chargers pro-football team Eugene Klein. Meanwhile, three fun-loving gamblers Miami Paul, Dino Mateo, and Big Bernie believed that Winning Colors could be the unlikely female winner of the 1988 Kentucky Derby.

In this moving memoir, Maeve Birch explores the dynamics between traditional horse handling and her communications with horses, which often didn’t align with what she was taught. In the stories shared, human issues such as codependency, lack of boundaries, impatience, violence, and fear crop up again and again, shaping horse and human relationships. Standing in a Field With Horses provides a window into the mind, spirituality, and social undercurrents of a woman trapped between obedience and self-expression along with the horses

A love letter to mothers everywhere, About My Mother will make you laugh and cry—and see yourself in its reflection. Peggy Rowe’s story of growing up as the daughter of Thelma Knobel is filled with warmth and humor. But Thelma could be your mother—there’s a Thelma in everyone’s life. She’s the person taking charge—the one who knows instinctively how things should be.

On an early summer morning in 2001, Mandy Retzlaff received the phone call that she and her family had been dreading. Her farmhouse in northern Zimbabwe was being decimated at the hands of an angry mob of Robert Mugabe’s war veterans, who had been tasked with driving white farmers from their homes. In just a few short days, forty-five of Mandy’s neighbours narrowly escaped with their lives and decided to leave Zimbabwe behind.

Frankel was born on 11th February 2008, with four white socks and a blaze, from impressive equine lines on both his parents’ sides. Simon Cooper revisits the whole of the horse’s life, giving listeners an inside tour of the calm oasis that is life on a stud farm, where a foal will live with his mother for the first year of his life. Next, the atmosphere of heady possibility that marks the early days of training. Roadwork. Gallops. Trials. Turning raw potential into something more. Frankel begins to set himself apart.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.

In the roaring '20s, adventurous young Sonora Webster sees an exciting act that will change her life forever. Hooves pound as a horse gallops up the ramp of a 40-foot-tall tower. A girl in a sparkly swimsuit waits at the top, and at the last possible second, leaps on its back as they dive through the air, falling to a tank of water far below with thunderous applause. Sonora is hooked. From that moment on, she is determined to BE that girl, despite the danger, and endeavors to join the diving horse troupe. This memoir follows her exciting career and life on the road as a traveling performer.

Drawing on their personal history as a former urban equestrian, Black queer person, and child of Jamaican and Filipino immigrants, essayist and art critic Bitter Kalli contends the horse should be regarded as a critical source of power and identity in Black life. In a series of astute essays, Kalli explores the work of Black artists and influencers from Beyoncé to filmmakers Tiona Nekkia-McClodden and Jeymes Samuel and explores their own life-long relationship to equines.

Crazy Horse was as much feared by tribal foes as he was honored by allies. His war record was unmatched by any of his peers, and his rout of Custer at the Little Bighorn reverberates through history. Yet so much about him is unknown or steeped in legend. Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life corrects older, idealized accounts - and draws on a greater variety of sources than other recent biographies - to expose the real Crazy Horse: not the brash Sioux warrior we have come to expect but a modest, reflective man whose courage was anchored in Lakota piety.

Christine Hemp's debut work of nonfiction, Wild Ride Home, is a brilliant memoir, looping themes of finding love and losing love, of going away and coming home, of the wretched course of Alzheimer's, of cancer, of lost pregnancies, of fly fishing and horsemanship, of second chances, and, ultimately, of the triumph of love and family—all told within the framework of the training of a little white horse named Buddy. Wild Ride Home invites the listener into the close Hemp family, which believes beauty and humor outshine the most devastating circumstances.

Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic, and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the Reservation and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.

Kim Wickens, a lawyer and dressage rider, became fascinated by this legendary horse when she learned that twelve of Thoroughbred racing's thirteen Triple Crown winners descended from Lexington. Wickens spent years meticulously researching the horse and his legacy—and with Lexington, she presents an absorbing, exciting account that transports listeners back to the raucous beginning of American horse racing and introduces them to the stallion at its heart.

At the age of 19, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race" - an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of 25 wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, and many fail to finish. Rough Magic captures the extraordinary story of one young woman who forged ahead, against all odds, to become the first female winner of this breathtaking race.

Horseshoe is based on a real-life story of a man who is said to have had a horse shoe with him all his life. No matter the circumstances, this man is able to overcome all sorts of hurdles.

In Bloodlines, Emmy and National Magazine award-winning journalist Melissa del Bosque follows Lawson and Perez's harrowing attempt to dismantle a cartel leader's American racing dynasty built on extortion and blood money. With extensive access to investigative evidence and in-depth interviews with key players, del Bosque turns more than three years of research and her decades of reporting on Mexico and the border into a gripping narrative about greed and corruption.

In the rolling green hills of Kaipara, Scottish vet Rory Dean and his two fox terriers, Scrappy and Alfie, are on call day and night for whichever animal emergency awaits. In Adventures of a Country Vet, Rory shares stories of the livestock and pets he's cared for as a rural vet in New Zealand and southwest England. From calving in a blizzard to a dog wounded in a pig-hunt, a horse castration gone wrong and warming a baby alpaca in the footwell of his ute, life as a vet is all-go.

Billy the Kid - a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney - was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, New Mexico, deputies, killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881.

One evening late in his life, veteran sportswriter Mike Sullivan was asked by his son what he remembered best from his three decades in the press box. The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was...just beauty, you know?" John Jeremiah Sullivan didn't know, not really - but he spent two years finding out, journeying from prehistoric caves to the Kentucky Derby in pursuit of what Edwin Muir called "our long-lost archaic companionship" with the horse.

In the wake of World War II, as turmoil and chaos were giving way to optimism, Americans were looking for inspiration and role models showing that it was possible to start from the bottom and work your way up to the top—and they found it in Stymie, the failed racehorse plucked from the discard heap by trainer Hirsch Jacobs. Taking listeners on a crowd-pleasing ride with Stymie and Jacobs, Out of the Clouds unwinds a real-life Horatio Alger tale of a dauntless team and its working-class fans who lived vicariously through the stouthearted little colt they embraced as their own.

Thoroughbred racing was one of the first major sports in early America. Horse racing thrived because it was a high-status sport that attracted the interest of both old and new money. It grew because spectators enjoyed the pageantry, the exciting races, and, most of all, the gambling. In The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime, author Steven Riess fills a long-neglected gap in sports history, offering a richly detailed and fascinating chronicle of thoroughbred racing's heyday.