A poignant and thorough look at a real-life horse-racing mystery.
Kray presents a true-crime book, set in the high-stakes world of horse racing and breeding, about the life and tragic death of a thoroughbred racehorse in the 1970s.
Horse-racing aficionados, and even some who have only a passing familiarity with sport, will know the name Alydar. The championship steed came in second to the champion thoroughbred Affirmed in all three of 1978’s Triple Crown races: the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes. Those races are covered in exciting detail in this nonfiction account, but it’s the events of Nov. 13-15, 1990, that form the crux of this work. During that period, Alydar, then retired and the top breeding stallion in the United States, was injured in his stall at Kentucky’s Calumet Farm and then euthanized. Although $36.5 million was paid out in insurance, there were questions raised about Alydar’s death that wouldn’t become public until more than a decade later. The author, an attorney specializing in animal law, presents a theory that the horse was killed for monetary gain. Kray details an official investigation, an insurance-fraud trial, and his own search for the truth in which he painstakingly interviewed key players to reconstruct what might have happened that fateful night in Alydar’s stall. It’s a heartbreaking but compelling story, meticulously researched and skillfully written. Kray’s love of horse racing shines in his recaps of races and equine descriptions, and his pacing and storytelling skills make this true-crime work feel like a gripping thriller. The fraud trial put two men behind bars, but no one was ever tried for the death of Alydar, and the last portion of this book offers a poignant closing argument that Kray says he would have made if he’d tried the case: “Today, I am representing Alydar, who never had a voice of his own. Today, I will be his voice,” he says, in part, to his imaginary jury. “Today will be his day. He deserves that, at the very least.” With this book, Kray has indeed given Alydar his day.
A poignant and thorough look at a real-life horse-racing mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798987213803
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Live Oak Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.
An actor and comedian tells the story of her journey from being an unpaired “animal” to a “new mammal mother” in love.
After Slate completed her first book, “the issue of finding a partner…never rested and never allowed rest for [her] either.” Senses heightened, she had stepped into her most animal self and was on a quest to “fulfill [her] mammal instincts.” Loneliness and emotional vulnerability made her seek connection with neighborhood dogs and insights from books that promised to bring soulmates. When love did finally find her, the anxiety that he would reject her for being herself and “drinking tequila on a Saturday afternoon…then [having] a bath with my friend” was intense. After the pair became a couple and Slate became pregnant with the baby she called “the lifeform,” her neuroses—which the author mocks through an imaginary session with a psychologist—went into overdrive. Yet even as she wrestled with her fears, Slate also discovered that the body that was so often a “bay of doubt” was also becoming a “harbor of well-being” for the life-form to which she was attached. Then, during a time of “plague and disruption,” the author “exploded [her] vagina” to give birth, becoming not only a mother, but a “mammal with a soul that [was] born anew every day.” Though still haunted by a “purple-dark hole marking me in the afternoons,” Slate had become secure enough in the “nest” she had built for herself to see the hole more as a “bluish egg-thing” portending possibility. At times whimsical in its flights of fancy and always surprising in the moments of lyrical grace it offers, Slate’s book celebrates the transformative power of surrendering to love and life.
Delightfully offbeat and unexpectedly moving.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9780316263931
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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