The Horse Book: Passion, Beauty, Splendor, Strength - Filled with Facts & Photos for Equine Lovers of All Ages!

The author knows horses and writes beautifully.

This is another of the lively Reaktion Books "Animal" series. It is as usual written to a sort of formula, but is well-written, among the best in the series. The publisher is British and this book has a mild European bias in focus. It includes some natural history, horses in human history, horses in art and literature and the horse now.I found Chapter 3, "The Man Made Horse" and Chapter 5, "Into the Valley of Death" to be the most absorbing. The first looks at breeding and the use of horses (traction, mounts, food, etc.) and the other considers the horse in war (most people do not know that the vaunted German blitz in 1939-1941 used perhaps five times as many horses as motor vehicles). In terms of personal interest, I liked the brief accounts of the Appaloosa and the Iceland horse. The horse in literature and art portion explores the image and idea of horse, which is interesting but a bit duller than the rest of the book.This is a good, fast read but rather substantial despite the shortness and formulaic aspect. If you're interested in the human/ animal interface, this is an informative read. The illustrations are on the whole, quite good. I read the e-book version.

This book is very sad and demonstrates man at his worst. How could they send or use horses to fight wars. I am glad not to have witnessed the first or second world war. As a family we have always supported Brooke Hospital for Working Animals, a reminder of the government's refusal to return our equines home from the middle East. They were sold into slavery, spending their final years worked to the bone, starving. If there are such creatures as saints, Dorothy Brooke was certainly one of them.