About the book
Journalist Wendy Williams, also an equestrienne, tells the history of the horse across 56 million years, from the protohorse to modern Thoroughbreds, Dutch Warmbloods and cow ponies. She travels to meet experts, asking what shared biology and differences reveal about the bond between horses and people, and what horses may think and feel. She views cave art in France and Spain, visits free-roaming mustangs in Wyoming, watches the Lipizzans of Vienna, meets a New Hampshire farm family that rehabilitates abandoned mustangs and considers the Garrano horses of Galicia and the Takhi horses of Mongolia. Recent findings on equine social and cognitive abilities run through the narrative. The book became a New York Times best seller.
Ryan Holiday named it one of his favorite reads of the previous year, praising the author's passion and the sweep of her history, and said it taught him that cave paintings depict almost no violence.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)
One of my favorite books I read last year (sneaked in under the wire). The author is so passionate, her history of this magnificent animal is so sweeping and captivating, her language is so beautiful. It's just great. Plus, I learned a lot. For instance, I had no idea that there is almost no violence depicted in cave paintings (I ended up chatting about it on Ask Historians, one of my favorite places on the internet) or that a lot of archaeologists think that horses originated in North America, migrated to Europe, went extinct here and then traveled back. In this way, horses were our gift to Europe...which they gifted back to us. I wish there'd been a bit more anthrozoology in the book--there's very little discussion of the role of the horse in history over the last 200-300 years (the most interesting part), but perhaps that's for a second book.
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