A Horse Named Seabiscuit

Mark Dubowski &
Cathy East Dubowski

Now, I know this is a book for kids, and not kids who are proficient readers. Still, that doesn't excuse some of the omissions here (for example, the reason Seabiscuit lost his first Big Cap-- Red Pollard's blindness). Kids like drama just as much as adults. They could handle the blind-in-one-eye thing.

Still, Seabiscuit's career is a tough thing to compress into forty-eight pages. The Dubowskis did try, and to some extent, they succeeded. They managed to do so without getting into anything too technical, which is a credit, but I think it was that unwillingness to get into the technical aspects that caused some of the more glaring omissions.

It's my hope that this will encourage kids to look for more complete kids' books on Seabiscuit (Ralph Moody's classic Come On Seabiscuit!, for example) once they get old enough to handle the larger books. But this is a decent beginning.