“I was given a short excerpt from this book in a creative writing class. And the particular reason that this excerpt was chosen was because of Laura Hillenbrand's ability to recreate historical events that she was not at. And the life that she infused into that scene, it was the scene - the race between Seabiscuit and War Admiral and it was as if we were all there. Seabiscuit is really the story of four individuals. Red Pollard, Charles Howard, Tom Smith, and the horse Seabiscuit. And they're four individuals that have been through a lot of hard times. Down on their luck so to speak and somehow fate brings them all together. And it's really one of those - I would call it a positive perfect storm type situations, where four different individual energies came together and created something absolutely memorable. This was a horse and three people associated with the horse that were not expected to succeed and somehow they did. And the country got behind them and it was just an amazing - it was amazing run that this one particular horse went on.
It feels like a historical novel to me. In a similar way to Capote, how Capote was able to, In Cold Blood, recreate scenes that he had not witnessed. Hillenbrand did an exhaustive amount of research to bring these scenes to life. I can't think of anything I didn't like about the book. It did take me a little while to get through. I had to read it in spurts because the information was somewhat dense.
I did see the movie and, in fact, I saw the movie first. The movie had actually changed a lot of things about the history or actually left out a lot of things. So it was my first experience of getting the deeper story. And that actually made me enjoy the book more because I felt like I was getting a more three dimensional view of the story than I'd gotten in the movie. I would give this book four and a half stars out of five.”
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