My Racing Heart

Nan Mooney

Nan Mooney loves horses. Specifically, Thoroughbreds, the ones who hit the track, dust it up with six to twelve of their closest friends, and make humans gape in awe at the process. This odd amalgam of personal-memoir-cum-treatise-on-track-life is not an unfamiliar breed to the horse fan; the measuring stick against which all such books are brought is Bill Barich's stunning Laughing in the Hills. I'm sure one day, another book that good in that genre will arrive. While My Racing Heart has its good points, to be simple about it, this ain't it.

Where Barich succeeds as so many others (Michael Klein, Mooney, Liz Mitchell, and many others) fail is in his ability to take two different things that have inherently different paces and make them merge together into one book whose readability is consistent across chapters on differing subjects (in Barich's case, handicapping the races at Golden Gate while dealing with his mother's cancer). He meshes the two in such a way that, despite being parallel narratives happening a country apart from one another, the whole thing flows. Seamless, like an egg, as Stephen King once said. In Mooney's case the two main threads are a basic nuts-and-bolts look at the Thoroughbred industry from someone with enough clout to get inside the lines but not enough cynicism to keep pumping out the same old platitudes and a memoir about her grandmother, who introduced her to horse racing at an age tender enough that I suspect her parents weren't very happy. Either of these two things on their own would have stood as a book in itself; the slow, meandering passages about her grandmother and how the two of them interacted and the snappy, sometimes sarcastic looks at track life. It is when the two are entwined with one another that things break down to the extent they do, with the reader finding himself transported with no warning from the high of making friends with a Kentucky Derby contender to a lazy meditation on what life must have been like in the early twenties in Alaska.

Not to say it isn't worth reading; that's not it at all. There is some fine stuff here. It just could have used a little tuning.