September 28, 1998
Scanlan, author of the Canadian horse books Riding High and Big Ben, may be wild about horses, but that doesn't mean that his gushing prose couldn't use some taming. "Time and Space and a Horse are what we had out there," he proclaims of a trek through the Wyoming wilderness. "I hiked up to the ridge... and felt powerful emotions surging in me. (Or was I just out of breath?) I kept thinking of the Shoshone.... Maybe they felt what pilgrims to Chartres or Mecca felt: an overwhelming sense of their own smallness." After wading through obvious observations ("To understand the unique and powerful kinship that humans feel with horses, we must look past mythology to history") and a choppy, uncritical amalgam of oft-retold horse lore, reverential character sketches, simplistic factoids and extensive quotes from other (better) works, such as Stephen Budiansky's The Nature of Horses, this equine elegy reads like an overgrown term paper. "In the world of horses," Scanlan observes, "it might also seem that under the sun there can be nothing new. Or at least nothing more to be written." Readers may well agree--and return instead to the primary sources listed in the extensive bibliography. Photos.