HORSE POWER

An illustrated history presents the working horse–human relationship through the ages.

With colorful illustrations drawn in a child-friendly style, the book intersperses double-page spreads, spot illustrations, and more than a few simplified maps showing small horse figures cavorting on continents to give an overall informative, if busy, look. Although a few dark-skinned, black-haired people are depicted, the majority of the humans illustrated have the same light beige skin color, including the buckskin-clad, black-haired youth astride an Appaloosa or the person garbed in desert robes riding an Arabian. The text—also visually lively as it intersperses callout boxes, sidebars, and ongoing narration—offers plenty of information that is, unfortunately, somewhat sanitized. Racehorses, for example, were and are often mistreated, and coal ponies certainly didn’t have a great life hauling coal underground in mines, but these issues are glossed over quickly as the story resolutely develops its theme of the importance of the role of the everyday working horse. The backmatter presents a timeline and author’s note, which do mention, more pointedly, the less-happy interactions of humans and horses (such as the 8 million horses killed in World War I), but the overall story would be far more balanced if these darker relationships had been included in the body of the story. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-22.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 24.8% of actual size.)

This homage to the role of the everyday horse in advancing human culture leaves out how the horse feels about it.