Book #35: Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand

There's been a long space between books that I've read here on the blog. I have just not been in the reading mood lately. We've had so much going on lately--we have had both of our families visit us, Tommy graduated from Duke, and we are getting ready to move. So I just have been wanting to get stuff done and work on my to-do list more than finding good books to read. But we are in Utah now, visiting the Leiningers, and as soon as we got here I bunkered down to read Seabiscuit. I tried to read this before and for some reason didn't really get into it, but I LOVED Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, and I really thought that I should like this one. So I tried it out again and it was totally worth it.

One of my favorite things about Unbroken was all of the chapters of background, historical information about flying in WWII and Japanese soldiers, and all that sort of stuff. Laura Hillenbrand really is a fantastic writer and knows how to fill in information that gives a lot of color to the stories she tells. In this book there are a few really fascinating chapters of background on the life of a jockey and the world of racing, and I found it so amazing. I feel like reading books like this I am always blown away by the amount of research that it must have taken to write this book and to put so much color into it. She found people who were alive then and who experienced Seabiscuit and who knew all of the people she's writing about, and interviewed them and got a lot of wonderful details that make the whole story really fascinating. And even though this book was about horse racing, something I knew nothing about, I never felt like I was lost or like I didn't understand what was going on, and I never felt like she had to go too technical into explaining everything about how horse racing works. This book had everything that I loved about Unbroken, and I really hope she writes more books because I love her writing style and how she encapsulates an entire story from so many different angles.