Racing Around Kentucky

Lynn S. Renau

Now, as anyone who's been reading my reviews for the past ten or so years knows, I'll read anything that relates even tangentially to any aspect of the Thoroughbred Racing industry as it is practiced in any country in the world. And my lack of giving out bad reviews to books on racing is due in no way to my affinity for the subject, but rather because I just hadn't stumbled across any bad ones. (And the tooth fairy is real. I look back over some old reviews and wonder what on earth I was thinking giving... ah, my memory is playing tricks on me; The American Handicapper did only receive a single star. So I do give bad reviews to horse racing books!) That, unfortunately, has changed mightily in the past year, as I've discovered the wonders of Interlibrary Loan, and I've found some stunningly bad books on all aspects of the racing world. The newest on the list is Lynn S. Renau's Racing Around Kentucky, which, while purporting to be many, many things, is mainly a history of racing as it relates to Kentucky. (This should not surprise the astute title reader.)

To be fair, Racing Around Kentucky is not nearly as awful as The American Handicapper or William Bauman's "classic" tome Smart Handicapping Made Easy. This is not a book designed to put you in the poorhouse within a month after you buy it. However, it does have a number of major shortcomings. I would guess that the majority of readers of this book will find the biggest complaint to be that the book tries to do too much in limited space; a quick run-down of everything Renau lists on the back of the book should tell you that a single book, especially one weighing in at only 214 pages, will not be able to cover all of Renau's topics with anything approaching comprehensiveness; in fact, many of the sections barely reach the level of a survey of the material. If you put aside the rest and concentrate on the history, though, my main complaint comes through-- the book's style, which ranges from the dry to the unreadable (one particular chapter in the book, that on Sallie Ward, is so badly organized that one will find oneself asking the question of whether Ms. Ward died before she was born, or how many Ms. Wards actually coexisted contemporaneously. This leads to mental images perhaps best left unearthed). As if the style weren't bad enough, the book is honeycombed with typos; if you found a particularly obsessive proofreading termite and sent him in to eat away all the typos in this book, you'd find yourself with a rather ratty volume when he was finished.

Especially at the prices for which this book goes today, it is only recommended for the most compulsive completist collectors of books on the Thoroughbred industry. The rest of you should be avoiding it as much as possible.