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Geraldine Brooks Probes Racing—and Race—in Her New Historical Novel, Horse

The Pulitzer Prize winner explores the unwritten true tale of America’s most famous racehorse—and uses that story to show how far we need to go in confronting systemic racism.

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Don’t let the title fool you; Geraldine Brooks’s Horse is not Black Beauty for grown-ups. Yes, the title character is one of history’s most famous equine celebrities, a foal named Darley, who later became a pop culture phenomenon called Lexington—and was revered as the fastest horse in the world. But first and foremost, Horse is a thrilling story about humanity in all its ugliness and beauty.

Lexington is one of several characters in the book—the rest of them human—based on real-life figures, as Horse is a product of careful research fleshed out with vivid imagination. It’s a technique that has served Brooks well; she earned a Pulitzer Prize for March, which follows the fictional father in Little Women, based in part on the real-life Bronson Alcott. But while the historic detail in the book is impressive, it’s the fictions filling in the blanks where Brooks’s genius truly shines.

Arguably the central character is Jarrett, the enslaved groom who raised Darley from a foal and risks his own life more than once to protect the horse. In her fascinating afterword, Brooks explains that she was inspired to create Jarrett after reading about a missing painting by equestrian artist T.J. Scott, described in an 1870 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine as depicting Lexington being led by “black Jarrett, his groom.” With no further information about the man available, Brooks took his name and created a complex individual, realizing the true scope of Horse. During her research into 19th-century racing, she found, as she writes in her end note, “this thriving industry was built on the labor and skill of Black horsemen, many of whom were, or had been, enslaved…it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse, it would also need to be about race.”

The lost painting features in the book as well, as Brooks imagines a dramatic and violent history for it that connects characters and time periods. In 1954, Martha Jackson, a female dealer in a male-dominated art world, stumbles upon a similar work that is tangentially involved in the death of Jackson Pollock. In 2019, Jess seeks portraits of Lexington to help reshape his skeleton for an exhibit, and Theo, a Lagos-born, Oxford-educated art historian, finds a cast-off horse painting and begins studying equine art through a post-colonial lens. Examining a portrait of a thoroughbred named Richard Singleton alongside several Black grooms, titled Richard Singleton with Viley’s Harry, Charles, and Lew, Theo thinks that the artist “may have portrayed these men as individuals, but perhaps only in the same clinical way that he exactly documented the splendid musculature of the thoroughbred. It was impossible not to suspect some equivalence between the men and the horse: valued, no doubt, but living by the will of their enslaver, submitting to the whip.” He goes on to notice that, “while the horse had two names, the men had only one.”

Horse unfolds in chapters told from various points of view, and each time the reader is reunited with Jarrett, the chapter bears the name of his enslaver, as the groom might have been described in a painting’s title: Warfield’s Jarrett, Ten Broeck’s Jarrett, Alexander’s Jarrett. It’s a device that forces the reader to consider a world in which gifted horses are valued more than human beings. And that’s not the only big question Horse asks. At a research facility studying the declining population of North Atlantic whales, Jess muses on “the artistry and the ingenuity of our own species,” and wonders, “How could we be so creative and destructive at the same time?” But far from being a preachy cautionary tale about man’s inhumanity to man and beast, this novel is a page-turner that reads like a series of mysteries: Who is this horse? Who was his groom? What happened to their shared portrait?

While those explorations drive the plot, it’s the voices of the different characters, each so distinct, that make the novel as delightful to read as it is thought-provoking. In 2019, Jess thinks, “careers can be as accidental as car wrecks.… Not many girls from Burwood Road in western Sydney got to go to French Guiana and bounce through the rainforest with scorpion specimens pegged across the jeep like so much drying laundry.” In 1854, Jarrett observes that “to be spoken of as livestock was as bitter as a gallnut.” And that same year, the equine painter, gambler, and sometime reporter Thomas J. Scott muses, “Modest winnings, payments for reportage—as ever, paltry and laggard—would not have kept me long in New Orleans, a city whose ample pleasures are a constant tax upon the purse.” The care with which Brooks crafts each character’s voice is a plea to look past the categorical labels and legends with which we describe each other, to truly see the individual. Paired with a compelling plot, the evocative voices create a story so powerful, reading it feels like watching a neck-and-neck horse race, galloping to its conclusion—you just can’t look away.

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When writing across cultural divides flattens characters

I t’s 2019 in Washington, D.C. , and Theo is changing his art-history dissertation after finding a painting of a horse in his neighbor’s giveaway pile. He is 26 years old, a Black Londoner (his mother is Yoruba, his father Californian) and a former star polo player. He left the sport for academia because of relentless racist harassment, and now studies stereotypes of Africans in British painting. The working title for his dissertation is Sambo, Othello, and Uncle Tom: Caricature, Exoticization, Subalternization, 1700–1900 . He jogs with his dog for exercise, careful to wear his Georgetown shirt because “his favorite run took him through lily-white Northwest Washington and Daniel, his best friend at Yale, had instructed him that a Black man, running, should dress defensively.” Because he’s from the U.K., he may not understand all the nuances of American racism, but he understands enough. When the lady across the street, from whom he got the horse painting, flinches as he approaches to help her, he feels “the usual gust of anger” and takes a deep breath, saying to himself: “Just a White woman, White-womaning.”

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Theo might be chagrined to find himself a protagonist in Horse , Geraldine Brooks’s latest work of historical fiction, which braids his story with the narrative of Jarret, an enslaved groom of the horse in the 19th-century painting Theo finds. For one, Theo is skeptical of white artists taking on Black subjects. The original hypothesis of his dissertation is that the Africans in British portraits were rendered less as people than as objects: “His argument mirrored Frederick Douglass’s caustic essay , arguing that no true portraits of Africans by White artists existed; that White artists couldn’t see past their own ingrained stereotypes of Blackness.”

This is a self-conscious—and bold—inclusion for a novel with not one but two young Black male protagonists written by a 66-year-old white Australian woman. Brooks is a skilled journalist and an acclaimed novelist, and Horse is not her first foray into historical fiction set in part during the American Civil War. Her novel March is narrated primarily by the father in Little Women , and tells the story of Mr. March’s years as a chaplain for the Union Army. That novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. Neither is this her first time writing across cultural divides. Her first nonfiction book, Nine Parts of Desire (1994) , was about the “hidden world of Islamic women.” Her 2011 novel, Caleb’s Crossing , is about a young white Puritan girl’s friendship with Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk , a character inspired by a Wampanoag man of the same name who was the first Native American to graduate from Harvard, in 1665.

This kind of venture has become trickier in the past 10 years. The publishing world has been racked by overdue debate about cultural appropriation and whether and how white authors should write characters from other racial or ethnic backgrounds. Five years after Brooks published Caleb’s Crossing , the white American writer Lionel Shriver gave a notorious keynote speech— briefly donning a sombrero —at a Brisbane literary festival, ranting about the “clamorous world of identity politics” and the threat she felt it posed to literature: “The kind of fiction we are ‘allowed’ to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.” Retorts and replies followed. “ It is possible to write about others not like oneself , if one understands that this is not simply an act of culture and free speech, but one that is enmeshed in a complicated, painful history of ownership and division,” the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen observed. More recently, the blockbuster turned critical conflagration American Dirt (a novel about migrant trauma, for which its white author was paid a seven-figure advance ) set off months of heated articles. Some pointed out that immigrants remain under-published and underpaid for their own stories in the American media market; others objected to the implication that any identity-based limits should be placed on a fiction writer’s license.

In putting Douglass’s argument so early in the book—on page 57—Brooks signals to us that she enters her latest project knowingly. She’s read up on the Discourse. A gauntlet has been thrown—white artists can’t do justice to Black subjects—and she will take it up. Despite her evident efforts, the book does not turn out to be the counterexample she might have hoped.

H orse started with a real horse: Lexington, who was one of the great racehorses of the 19th century and a prolific sire. When Lexington died, his skeleton became an exhibit but was later forgotten in the attic of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History . Brooks, a horsewoman herself, grew fascinated with the painter Thomas J. Scott, who did several portraits of Lexington, and she was especially curious about one of Scott’s portraits that remains missing. A description of that painting in a July 1870 issue of Harper’s magazine describes Lexington being led by “black Jarret, his groom.” Nothing else is known about the real Jarret, and Horse grew out of Brooks’s imaginings of the life he might have lived. She had wanted to write about horses, she admits in her afterword. But as she researched horse racing in the antebellum South, “it became clear to me that this novel could not merely be about a racehorse; it would also need to be about race.”

The structure of the novel is poly-vocal, occupying a loose, floating third person as its short chapters jump among its cast of characters. The story is bounded historically by 2020 in Washington, D.C., where Theo’s find is identified as a lost 19th-century portrait of Lexington, and the 1850s at several southern horse-breeding farms, where Jarret, a gifted and reserved young horse trainer, develops a spiritual, even psychic connection with a newborn foal named Darley, who will later become famous as Lexington. The boy and the horse become best friends and deeply bonded partners. “That horse about the only one thing I care for,” Jarret declares. Though his father, also a horse trainer, has bought his own freedom, Jarret remains enslaved, and his story line is fraught with vulnerability: Jarret and Lexington are sold together from one wealthy landowner to another, to another.

Occasionally, the book swerves to the 1950s in New York, where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner make an appearance: Their friend, an art dealer named Martha Jackson, acquires one of the lost Lexington paintings from her maid, who seems to have inherited it from an ancestor connected to Jarret. (This third era’s plot, which is also based in historical fact, is notably less developed than the other two.) Sometimes Jarret’s perspective dominates in the novel; other times Scott’s or Theo’s vantage prevails—or that of Jess, a young white Australian woman who’s pursuing her fascination with zoological research at the Smithsonian in 2019; or that of Mary, the young daughter of the white emancipationist Cassius Clay and a frequent presence at the Meadows, the farm where Jarret and his father work. Intermittently, Brooks serves up a mix of multiple viewpoints over the course of a single chapter.

But in spirit, the book belongs to Jarret and Theo, with complementary foils in the form of the two young white women. (While there are several Black female characters in the book, none is granted complex interiority.) In 2019, Theo begins to date Jess, despite some ambivalence. In 1850, Mary likes to hang around the barns and talk to Jarret (who is two years older) while he works. Brooks has taken pains to make both women flawed: Whereas Jarret and Theo are carefully dressed, meticulous, and possessed of “impeccable manners,” these women are often careless, unkempt, emotionally fragile—and racist without quite knowing it. Jess and Theo meet because she assumes he’s stealing her bike. She’s then so embarrassed by her behavior that she tells him she found the incident traumatic. (“Typical, Theo thought. He’d been accused, yet she was traumatized.”) When Mary is angry, she reminds Jarret that he’s enslaved, and then feels hurt later when she tells him that she considers them friends and he is too incredulous at the idea to reciprocate.

Brooks clearly attempts to demonstrate self-awareness, to preemptively deflect any criticism that she has favored the characters whose life experience most resembles her own—but the dynamic she creates between Theo and Jess and between Jarret and Mary flattens all the characters. Theo and Jarret are described, at every turn, as exemplary, socially and spiritually. They are handsome, tall, gifted, and educated (Jarret takes an opportunity to learn how to read). Animals instinctively trust them (Theo and his dog are exquisitely attuned). They are constantly swallowing their rage. They are always patiently explaining something. Where others stumble, they are steady. Theo tells Jess at one point that he wants to help his old-lady neighbor even if she’s racist, because “ ‘whatever she might be, it doesn’t mean that I won’t do what I know to be right.’ Jess sighed, defeated, and smiled at him. ‘You’re just a better person than me, I guess.’ ”

Theo is a better person than Jess, no doubt, but Brooks grants Jess something that she denies Theo—and to a degree Jarret. Jess gets to fail; Jess gets to change. By contrast, Theo is static. Sometimes he reads like a caricature: “He was his own man long before any of his peers even realized that was an option. He’d embraced life as a rootless loner, at home in the world but belonging nowhere in particular. Comfortable with a wide range of people, close to very few.” He remains angry but patient, smart, gentlemanly, and gentle to the end.

Jarret, the most rounded of the many characters who take turns narrating Horse , changes less than you would expect given that the story tracks him from adolescence into his late 30s. His spiritual evolution is condensed into two formative episodes. In the first, he is saved by Mary and her father from an ill-conceived escape attempt, and he learns thereafter to control his anger and work within the constraints of his enslavement. The second leap forward—which is presented as his real moral maturation—comes when he is briefly forbidden to care for Lexington and is sent to labor in the fields, where he is whipped.

Startlingly, this is framed as a blessing:

He conceived, in those hard days, a renewed gratitude toward his father, who had endured hardship to rise to a measure of dignity that had extended its protective cloak over Jarret’s childhood. He learned, in those fields, what he had been spared. He felt a new understanding for the folk who bore it, and an admiration for those brave enough to risk everything to run away from such a life. An empathy grew in him. He began to watch people with the sensitive attention he’d only ever accorded his horses … Even as his world contracted and pressed in upon him, in equal measure his heart expanded.

When Jarret finally reunites with Lexington and leaves that plantation, he reflects that “he wasn’t sorry to have seen what he’d seen, and learned what he learned. Not just the book learning. He felt larger in spirit. There was a space in his soul for the suffering of people. He resolved to take account of their lives, the heavy burdens they carried.”

These passages call to mind the history of white people insisting that whippings under chattel slavery were an experience of moral training upon which the enslaved might reflect with sanguine gratitude—a history that Brooks is aware of but nevertheless echoes here. Jarret, an emotional teenager who doesn’t seem to lack empathy in the first place, is turned into a saint, floating somewhat above the action.

I keep thinking about Parul Sehgal’s elegant panning of American Dirt , in which she joins the novelist Hari Kunzru in arguing that “imagining ourselves into other lives and other subjectives is an act of ethical urgency.” Transracial authorial imagining, she writes, is a profound undertaking. “The caveat is to do this work of representation responsibly, and well.” Brooks’s attempt is made earnestly, but not well. In keeping with the character construction, the plot itself veers toward formula. Horse relies on ungainly cliff-hangers to pull the reader from chapter to chapter. (In one, Jess inspects Lexington’s skeleton in 2019 and concludes, “Something had happened to this horse when it was alive. Something dreadful.”) The romance is bland. (“Was it the wine, or was she becoming infatuated with this man?”) The details occasionally inspire a flinch (describing an enslaved young man as a “dusky youth”), and the moments when Brooks addresses racism more directly can read as self-conscious and pedantic. (“Look. It’s not your fault you get to move easy in the world,” Theo’s friend Daniel tells Jess after an act of violence. “We just can’t afford to.”)

Brooks is an accomplished writer, and many of her gifts are evident amid the clumsiness of the overall effort. The relationship between Jarret and Lexington is intimate and compelling. When they are briefly separated, the uncertainty of their reunion feels like an existential crisis. Brooks has a talent and passion for research that is fully expressed here—she writes beautifully about the anatomy of horses and the delicate work of “articulating” their skeletons, arranging every bone in its proper place. The descriptions of 19th-century horse racing, when the animals were bred differently and raced much longer tracks, are thrilling. Brooks has attended with equal care to the quotidian details of each era (corn pone in the antebellum South, bebop for Jackson Pollock, mid-century-modern furniture for Theo).

I read to the end wanting Horse to right itself, to be one of those books that achieve the creative and ethical intersubjectivity that signals great fiction. Brooks gives Jarret and Theo just enough spark to make us wish she’d also given them a more deeply imagined, nuanced, and substantial portrayal. Each ends as a trope: one a man who triumphs against all odds, the other a martyr. Brooks’s sympathies are evidently with them, and so are ours. But sympathy seems like an inadequate achievement in a project like this, which takes as its subject the worst consequences of white Americans’ failure to recognize the full humanity of Black people. Sympathy has a way of falling short, aesthetically as well as politically—it is a frail substitute for the knotty, vital insight that can emerge from sustained immersion in another psyche, another soul. If readers feel sorry for Theo and Jarret without really needing to believe in them as whole beings, what exactly do their portraits accomplish?

This article appears in the July/August 2022 print edition with the headline “A White Author Fails Her Black Characters.”

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by Geraldine Brooks

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“Historical fiction” may be one name for Geraldine Brooks’s craft, but that label doesn’t do her novels justice. Her Pulitzer Prize-winner, March (2005) , spotlights the taciturn father from Little Women. A transcendentalist compelled to enter the Union Army, he is a man of ideas struggling to become a man of action. People of the Book (2008) follows a Jewish manuscript from medieval Spain to modern Bosnia through exile, conflict, and genocide. Brooks’s novels don’t just use history as backdrop; they plumb the depths of the past in search of wisdom for the present.

Horse brings together the best parts of Brooks’s earlier work. It combines March ’s focus on the American Civil War with People of the Book ’s multiple narrators. Like March , Horse focuses on a character, while also centering on objects, like People of the Book .

The title refers to the label on a skeleton gathering dust in the Smithsonian’s attic. As it turns out, “Horse” is as much of a misnomer for Lexington, called “the greatest thoroughbred stud sire in racing history,” as “historical fiction” is for Horse. In Washington, D.C. in 2019, Jess, a zoologist, is called to restore Lexington’s newly-identified bones for public display. She collaborates with Theo, an art historian, who finds a painting of a horse in his neighbor’s garbage. This is the premise for Brooks’s latest transhistorical, when-worlds-collide plot.

Jess and Theo’s stories are interspersed with that of Jarret, Lexington’s groom, during the 1850s and 60s. Born into slavery in Kentucky, Jarret bonds with a colt called Lexington, setting out to prove that “all men are equal on the turf or under it” and hoping to win enough at the races to purchase his freedom. Lexington grows famous for his speed and endurance under Jarret’s care, but, by 1854, “the enmity is grown so great that even the turf provides no neutral ground.” Sold, along with Lexington, first to a New Orleans entrepreneur, then back to Kentucky, Jarret watches the Civil War unfold from the South’s elite stables. In 2019, Jess and Theo know nothing about Jarret. Nevertheless, they use the evidence they have to reconstruct his world.

In Horse, Brooks examines what others have overlooked. Like Horse ’s protagonists, she rummages through what looks like junk, searching for treasure. Jess rescues Lexington’s bones and “articulates” them; Theo salvages the painting to restore it. These objects carry traces of the past that need to be studied in order to be understood—and in order for their full stories to be told.

Part Da Vinci Code and part Nickel Boys, Horse draws readers into a historical mystery: what made Lexington so great? If he was so great, why was he forgotten? ( Seabiscuit gets a shoutout, too.) In its search for answers, the novel wavers between awe and indignation. While many of the novel’s characters are historical figures (abolitionist Cassius Clay, art dealer Martha Jackson, Lexington himself), Jarret is just a figure in a painting—the painting of Lexington “led by Black Jarret, his groom” recorded in an artist’s catalogue. A painting that’s now lost.

At the novel’s heart, then, is a more important question: how did we forget about Jarret? The bitter fact of knowing more about the horse than the man is not lost on Brooks. She elevates the history of Black grooms, trainers, and jockeys even as she underscores the disturbing interchangeability of the men with the horses they rode. When the New Orleans horse racing impresario Ten Broek says “this [ … ] is my Jarret. He knows the horse. Follow his advice in every particular, as if his instructions were my own,” Jarret “trie[s] to ignore the dissonant clanging of Ten Broeck’s words. My horse. My Jarret. New grandstands, new barns—did the man just buy up everything he wanted in this world?” This is Horse ’s strength: it depicts dignity and indignity at once. It asks readers to remember the passion and expertise Black men brought to the sport of horse racing and to recognize the violence that kept them out of its official record. As the novel shows, the horse whose legacy is preserved in museums, art galleries, and stud catalogues would not exist if not for the man whose life is irrecoverable except through fiction.

Horse may be better on the past than the present. The novel’s attempts to depict the Black Lives Matter movement and other current events can be clunky. But its spirit of humility and humanity prevails. Words directed at a collector buying Lexington’s painting may as well be directed at Brooks: “I guess you like horses.” Like her, Brooks responds: “It’s far more complicated than that.” Horse shows us just how complicated it is.

Published on September 6, 2022

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Horse by Geraldine Brooks

• Publication Date: January 16, 2024
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN-10: 0399562974
• ISBN-13: 9780399562976
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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

by Geraldine Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 2022

Strong storytelling in service of a stinging moral message.

A long-lost painting sets in motion a plot intertwining the odyssey of a famed 19th-century thoroughbred and his trainer with the 21st-century rediscovery of the horse’s portrait.

In 2019, Nigerian American Georgetown graduate student Theo plucks a dingy canvas from a neighbor’s trash and gets an assignment from Smithsonian magazine to write about it. That puts him in touch with Jess, the Smithsonian’s “expert in skulls and bones,” who happens to be examining the same horse's skeleton, which is in the museum's collection. (Theo and Jess first meet when she sees him unlocking an expensive bike identical to hers and implies he’s trying to steal it—before he points hers out further down the same rack.) The horse is Lexington, “the greatest racing stallion in American turf history,” nurtured and trained from birth by Jarret, an enslaved man who negotiates with this extraordinary horse the treacherous political and racial landscape of Kentucky before and during the Civil War. Brooks, a White writer, risks criticism for appropriation by telling portions of these alternating storylines from Jarret’s and Theo’s points of view in addition to those of Jess and several other White characters. She demonstrates imaginative empathy with both men and provides some sardonic correctives to White cluelessness, as when Theo takes Jess’ clumsy apology—“I was traumatized by my appalling behavior”—and thinks, “Typical….He’d been accused, yet she was traumatized.” Jarret is similarly but much more covertly irked by well-meaning White people patronizing him; Brooks skillfully uses their paired stories to demonstrate how the poison of racism lingers. Contemporary parallels are unmistakable when a Union officer angrily describes his Confederate prisoners as “lost to a narrative untethered to anything he recognized as true.…Their fabulous notions of what evils the Federal government intended for them should their cause fail…was ingrained so deep, beyond the reach of reasonable dialogue or evidence.” The 21st-century chapters’ shocking denouement drives home Brooks’ point that too much remains the same for Black people in America, a grim conclusion only slightly mitigated by a happier ending for Jarret.

Pub Date: June 14, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-39-956296-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colleen Hoover

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

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9780399562969

Geraldine Brooks

Penguin Publishing Group

14 June 2022

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Summary and Reviews of Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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• First Published:
• Jun 14, 2022, 416 pages
• Jan 2024, 464 pages

• Historical Fiction
• Washington DC
• Tenn. Va. W.Va. Ky.
• 19th Century
• Contemporary
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Book Summary

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.

Kentucky, 1850 . An enslaved groom named Jarret and a bay foal forge a bond of understanding that will carry the horse to record-setting victories across the South. When the nation erupts in civil war, an itinerant young artist who has made his name on paintings of the racehorse takes up arms for the Union. On a perilous night, he reunites with the stallion and his groom, very far from the glamor of any racetrack. New York City, 1954 . Martha Jackson, a gallery owner celebrated for taking risks on edgy contemporary painters, becomes obsessed with a nineteenth-century equestrian oil painting of mysterious provenance. Washington, DC, 2019 . Jess, a Smithsonian scientist from Australia, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian, find themselves unexpectedly connected through their shared interest in the horse—one studying the stallion's bones for clues to his power and endurance, the other uncovering the lost history of the unsung Black horsemen who were critical to his racing success. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.

THEO Georgetown, Washington, DC 2019

The deceptively reductive forms of the artist's work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence. These glyphs and ideograms signal to us from the crossroads: freedom and slavery, White and Black, rural and urban. No. Nup. That wouldn't do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people. Theo pressed the delete key and watched the letters march backward to oblivion. All that was left was the blinking cursor, tapping like an impatient finger. He sighed and looked away from its importuning. Through the window above his desk, he noticed that the elderly woman who lived in the shabby row house directly across the street was dragging a bench press to the curb. As the metal legs screeched across the pavement, Clancy raised a startled head and jumped up, putting his front paws on the desk beside Theo's laptop. His immense ears, like radar dishes, twitched toward the noise. Together, Theo and the dog ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• On page 28 (Theo, Georgetown, Washington, DC, 2019), Theo reflects that depictions of horses are among the oldest art humans created. The book's epigraphs reflect on the significance of Lexington—in his day, an even bigger celebrity than Seabiscuit or Secretariat. Discuss the enduring human fascination with horses—do they move you more than other animals, and if so, why?
• Theo and Jess are both obsessed with their rarefied fields of expertise. Does the author manage to convey why these unusual careers can be so compelling? If so, how?
• Jarret's connection with horses is presented as stronger than his bonds with people. How does his love for and dedication to Lexington help or hamper his coming of age and his transformation ...
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Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing... continued

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(Reviewed by Jane McCormack ).

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Beyond the Book

Black jockeys: the foundation of american horse racing.

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Geraldine Brooks’s Horse is a richly detailed examination of the violence of America’s past

Kidman Chair in Australian Studies, University of Adelaide

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Anne Pender has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the National Library of Australia.

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In a letter accompanying the advance copy of her latest novel, Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks reveals the inspiration for Horse .

The author was propelled into the research for this masterly work by a chance conversation with a staff member from the Smithsonian Museum regarding the fastest, most celebrated American racehorse of the 19th century:

A horse so fast that the mass-produced stopwatch was manufactured so his fans could clock times in races that regularly drew more than twenty thousand spectators. A horse so handsome that the best equestrian artists vied to paint him …

Review: Horse – Geraldine Brooks (Hachette)

Brooks offers a richly textured, intricately developed narrative about that magnificent horse, his trainer, the artist who painted them, and those who restored the skeleton of the great creature in a museum many years later.

She refers to these elements as the “factual scaffolding” for her novel. As the reader discovers in the potted biographies of a dozen or so historical figures Brooks has provided, the scaffolding is a robust and complex structure.

Indeed, this is a novel that explores and exposes real historical figures and actual conditions, events and forces. These are animated through Brooks’ exquisite character construction. Horse deftly reveals the long-term effects of history, depicting the continuities of the brutal treatment of African Americans in the United States during the era of slavery and its deadly manifestations today.

Daring and disturbing

Horse is a daring and disturbing novel, in that Brooks makes not one but two young African American men the central characters.

She draws a sustained comparison between the young horse trainer, Jarret, an enslaved man with a prodigious talent for horsemanship and an equally profound love for the animals, and Theo, a doctoral student at Georgetown and one-time Oxford polo player, who has a dog called Clancy and an immense knowledge of 19th century painting.

The novel is daring because Brooks presents the action variously from the point of view of each of these men as the novel progresses (as well as several other characters, including an Australian curator). It is disturbing because of the extreme cruelty each young man endures, despite the historical distance between them and the marked contrast in their social and economic circumstances.

The wealth of historical detail is an impressive element in Horse, and yet it is worn lightly. The world of horse training and racing and its rapid development in the antebellum South – a world of geopolitical tensions and catastrophic greed – provide the background and impetus for the story of the origin, training and career of the exceptional horse known as Lexington.

Plantation life and its hierarchies of enslaved and other workers are revealed through Jarret, who tenderly and expertly rears, trains and protects this extraordinary horse.

He faces the insatiable demands of the track masters and his vulnerability as a man owned by another and sold at a whim. At first, he is “Warfield’s Jarret”, then “Ten Broeck’s Jarret”, “Alexander’s Jarret”, and finally “Jarret Lewis”.

The relationship between Jarret and the horse in his care is the core of the novel and the source of its power. Beyond the novel’s ingenious structure and engrossing historical depth, Jarret’s intense connection to this being provides Horse with much of its strength, warmth and beauty. When he realises that his beloved Lexington is going blind on a long journey from New York City, Brooks writes:

They had stopped for long rests at farms where Ten Broeck had connections, and in every strange place, Jarret worked from light to last on building Lexington’s confidence. He slept in the pasture so that the horse would be reassured by his familiar scent. By the end of the journey even a strange paddock held no terrors.

The abuse of Jarret and the horses is a constant threat. Brooks renders Jarret’s unflagging resistance and fortitude carefully and without sentimentality.

Read more: Set in a 19th century Australian leper colony, Eleanor Limprecht's The Coast depicts past cruelties, but has powerful things to say about the present

Historical detail

Brooks’s knowledge and understanding of horses permeates this compelling work of historical fiction. She presents detailed descriptions of the anatomical variations of thoroughbreds, the biomechanics of their speed and strength, breeding strategies, the methods and foibles of farriers, and the individual temperaments of a range of horses.

These details infuse the story with a distinctive power. The daily regimes of training and the exigencies of the 24-hour care provided by Jarret are rendered with suppleness. The suffering of Lexington and his record-breaking triumphs on the racecourse are vividly depicted and provide the novel with its narrative arc.

The novel’s account of the business of portraiture, including the painting of prize horses, as a feature of 19th century pastoral life and as a form of wealth signalling, offers another rich seam. Brooks understands art history and the world of curatorial and institutional rivalries. Most of all, she understands the precarity of artists’ lives in the past and present, and portrays them with insight.

Among a large cast of characters, artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner , philanthopist Paul Mellon , and art dealer Martha Jackson appear in later chapters as the mystery around a particular painting unfolds. Even here there are no false notes, as the story of the art world intersects with the lives of the horse trainer, owners and their families.

Read more: Historical fiction deserves a future – and at present it's looking good

An exploration of violence

Horse is explicit in its exploration of violence – the violence of the most powerful over the least powerful in American society before, during and after the Civil War. Brooks presents violence towards non-human animals and their ruthless exploitation for maximum financial gain as corollaries of the broader violence of society.

The gradations of violence from casual to systemic and the complexity of the relationships created by Brooks allow for a steady consideration of historical and contemporary conditions without a hint of the didactic.

Historical fiction has attracted disdain from critics for several reasons. These have included its association with Sir Walter Scott and conservative nationalism, its blending of fact and fiction, its connection with Gothic novels, its origins in romance, and its evolution into popular romances.

In 1901, Henry James stated that historical fiction suffered from a “ fatal cheapness ”, because it is impossible for a writer to represent the consciousness of a person from an earlier time using their “modern apparatus”. James argued that writers should come back to the “palpable present”.

More recently, the New Yorker critic James Wood has labelled historical fiction a “ gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness ”.

Wood does, however, make an exception for Hilary Mantel, praising her “novelistic intelligence”, lack of sentimentality, and characterisation. The same case can be made for Brooks with Horse.

Her careful creation of sensibility in her characters, her overarching intelligence, and her refusal of sentimentality represent historical fiction at its best. Brooks has once more weighed into American history, offering bold characterisation, a compelling story, and a fresh perspective on narratives of self-definition, progress and change.

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Posted on 24 Jan 2023 in Fiction |

GERALDINE BROOKS Horse. Reviewed by Catherine Pardey

Tags: Australian women writers / Geraldine Brooks / Kentucky / Martha Jackson / racehorses / Thomas J Scott / thoroughbred horses

In unearthing the story of a 19th-century thoroughbred, Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks examines racism then and now.

Geraldine Brooks takes on a mighty task in her latest novel, Horse , covering events leading up to the American Civil War through the story of champion runner Lexington, and juxtaposing contemporary events, complete with the vague tremors of political correctness that shape so many people’s thoughts today. But of course, she is up to it. What isn’t she up to? For over two decades Brooks’ net has been cast far and wide and whatever she fetches up is always written about convincingly, interestingly, and engagingly. Horse is no exception.

Beginning in the twenty-first century with Theo, a young Black PhD student in Washington DC, who by chance comes across a painting of a horse, Brooks segues seamlessly into the story of Jess, a young Australian who runs the vertebrate osteology lab in the Smithsonian, which is more fun than it sounds. Jess, perhaps like Brooks, misses aspects of her Australian home:

  Jess missed … perhaps more than anything else about her Sydney home: the sense of being at the watery edge of things, turning a corner and being confronted by a shimmer of sunlight on waves, a crescent of sand curved below a rock-ribbed headland.

After these brief but effective introductions, Brooks then takes us back to Kentucky in the 1850s to begin the story of Lexington, the horse of the title, and his beloved groom Jarret, which swiftly establishes itself as the main story of the novel. Brooks tells us in her Afterword that Jarret is an entirely fictional character, as indeed are Theo and Jess, but hats off to Brooks, because Jarret, who is only outshone by the horse, is an endearing protagonist whose journey we follow, often with great concern.

And this – our concern for both Jarret and Theo – is the great triumph of the book. Brooks is always reminding us, both in Jarret’s story and Theo and Jess’s story – Theo and Jess quickly and satisfyingly become romantically entwined – that Black lives in the USA have always been, and shamingly still are, too often lived at the racist whims of Whites. The brutality of the slave system endured by Jarret is drawn deftly and movingly:

By the end of the week, his good shirt hung in shreds and red weals bloomed across his shoulders. From before first light till full dark, the days were a blur of throbbing pain, agonized spirits.  

The headings for Jarret’s chapters are for the most part not just Jarret’s name but also the name of his owner. Thus the first Jarret chapter is titled ‘Warfield’s Jarret’ because that is who Jarret is, a man who is not free but owned by somebody else.

And Theo, too, despite his story being set in over 150 years after the abolition of slavery, must still confront the prejudices meted out to Black men in the USA. His close friend tells Jess that he has tried to give Theo ‘“the talk”, like their parents did when they were kids’, but Theo, having grown up in England, finds it difficult to comprehend how vastly different English racism and American racism could be.

In her quest to find out about the horse Lexington, Brooks comes across two interesting real-life people who play rewarding walk-on roles in Horse . The artist Thomas J Scott, a thoroughbred painter, serves both to show Northern prejudices, seemingly minimal when compared to those in the South but there all the same, as well as allowing Brooks to give us some contextual knowledge of the nature of the Civil War. Brooks’ knowledge of horses is prodigious, including of their skeletal structure, as is evident in her descriptions of Jess’s work, and her knowledge of painting. Scott was known for incorporating insights into the horse’s personality in his portraits, and in a lovely scene Jarret gives Scott an insight into Glacier, one of the horses on the Warfield property, telling him that he is ‘fly’:

‘Fly means … smart, but quiet about it. Not a know-it-all. Not cunning neither, because that’s like being crooked, and Glacier’s not that way.’

The second walk-on role belongs to Martha Jackson, the American art dealer who, intriguingly, bequeathed Scott’s portrait of Lexington to the Smithsonian. Intriguingly because it was so very different from the kind of art she usually collected and sold. Martha Jackson was also the person who traded her sports car with Jackson Pollack for two of his paintings, and this became the car in which he later died.

Horse is a moving, wonderful story, in parts powerful enough to make a reader cry, as indeed was the last sentence of Brooks’ Afterword, revealing that her husband Tony Horowitz had died while she was writing the novel. It is always the mark of a good writer that they unintentionally make the reader like them as much as they like their writing.

Geraldine Brooks Horse Hachette Australia HB 416pp $39.99

Catherine Pardey has reviewed for  Rochford Street Review  and  The Beast.

You can buy  Horse from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia .

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library .

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Horse: A Novel Hardcover – June 14, 2022

• Print length 416 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Viking
• Publication date June 14, 2022
• Dimensions 6.24 x 1.28 x 9.26 inches
• ISBN-10 0399562966
• ISBN-13 978-0399562969
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com review, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Georgetown, Washington, DC

The deceptively reductive forms of the artist's work belie the density of meaning forged by a bifurcated existence. These glyphs and ideograms signal to us from the crossroads: freedom and slavery, White and Black, rural and urban.

No. Nup. That wouldn't do. It reeked of PhD. This was meant to be read by normal people.

Theo pressed the delete key and watched the letters march backward to oblivion. All that was left was the blinking cursor, tapping like an impatient finger. He sighed and looked away from its importuning. Through the window above his desk, he noticed that the elderly woman who lived in the shabby row house directly across the street was dragging a bench press to the curb. As the metal legs screeched across the pavement, Clancy raised a startled head and jumped up, putting his front paws on the desk beside Theo's laptop. His immense ears, like radar dishes, twitched toward the noise. Together, Theo and the dog watched as she shoved the bench into the teetering ziggurat she'd assembled. Propped against it, a hand-lettered sign: FREE STUFF.

Theo wondered why she hadn't had a yard sale. Someone would've paid for that bench press. Or even the faux-Moroccan footstool. When she brought out an armful of men's clothing, it occurred to Theo that all the items in the pile must be her dead husband's things. Perhaps she just wanted to purge the house of every trace of him.

Theo could only speculate, since he didn't really know her. She was the kind of thin-lipped, monosyllabic neighbor who didn't invite pleasantries, much less intimacies. And her husband had made clear, through his body language, what he thought about having a Black man living nearby. When Theo moved into Georgetown University's graduate housing complex a few months earlier, he'd made a point of greeting the neighbors. Most responded with a friendly smile. But the guy across the street hadn't even made eye contact. The only time Theo had heard his voice was when it was raised, yelling at his wife.

It was a week since the ambulance had come in the night. Like most city dwellers, Theo could sleep right through a siren that Dopplered away, but this one had hiccuped to sudden silence. Theo jolted awake to spinning lights bathing his walls in a wash of blue and red. He jumped out of bed, ready to help if he could. But in the end, he and Clancy just stood and watched as the EMTs brought out the body bag, turned the lights off, and drove silently away.

At his grandmother's house in Lagos, any death in the neighborhood caused a flurry in the kitchen. As a kid visiting on school holidays, he'd often been tasked with delivering the steaming platters of food to the bereaved. So he made a stew the next day, wrote a condolence card, and carried it across the street. When no one answered the door, he left it on the stoop. An hour later, he found it back on his own doorstep with a terse note: Thanks but I don't like chicken. Theo looked down at Clancy and shrugged. "I thought everyone liked chicken." They ate it themselves. It was delicious, infused with the complex flavors of grilled peppers and his homemade, slow-simmered stock. Not that Clancy, the kelpie, cared about that. In the no-nonsense insouciance of his hardy breed, he'd eat anything.

The thought of that casserole made Theo's mouth water. He glanced at the clock in the corner of his laptop. Four p.m. Too early to quit. As he started typing, Clancy circled under the desk and flopped back down across his instep.

These arresting compelling images are the only known surviving works created by an artist born into slavery enslaved. Vernacular, yet eloquent, they become semaphores from a world convulsed. Living Surviving through the Civil War, forsaking escaping the tyranny of the plantation for a marginalized life in the city, the artist seems compelled to bear witness to his own reality, paradoxically exigent yet rich.

Awful. It still read like a college paper, not a magazine article.

He flipped through the images on his desk. The artist confidently depicted what he knew-the crowded, vibrant world of nineteenth-century Black domestic life. He had to keep the text as simple and direct as the images.

Bill Traylor, born enslaved, has left us the only

A movement across the street drew his eye up from the screen. The neighbor was trying to move an overstuffed recliner. It was teetering on its side on the top step as she struggled to keep a grip on it.

She could use help. He did a quick personal inventory: Shorts on, check. T-shirt, check. Working in his un-air-conditioned apartment, Theo would sometimes spend the whole day in his underwear, forgetting all about his dŽshabillement until confronted by the quizzical gaze of the FedEx guy.

He reached the other side of the street just as gravity won, prising the chair from her grip. He jumped up the step and body-blocked it. Her only acknowledgment was a grunt and a quick lift of her chin. She bent down and grabbed the underside of the chair. Theo hefted an armrest. Together, crabwise, they shuffled to the curb.

The woman straightened, pushing back her thin, straw-colored hair, and rubbing her fists into the small of her back. She waved an arm at the ziggurat. "Anything you want . . ." Then she turned and ascended the steps.

Theo couldn't imagine wanting anything in this sadness-infused pile of discards. His apartment was sparsely furnished: a midcentury-modern desk and a Nelson sofa acquired at a thrift store. The rest of the available space was filled mostly with art books, shelved on scavenged planks and milk crates he'd spray-painted matte black.

But Theo, the son of two diplomats, had been raised by the commandment that bad manners were a mortal sin. He had to at least pretend to look. There were some old paperbacks stuffed into a beer carton. He was always curious about what people read. He reached down to check the titles.

And that was when he saw the horse.

Smithsonian Museum Support Center, Maryland

Jess was seven when she dug up the dog. He'd been dead a year. She and her mum had buried him with ceremony, under the flowering red gum in the backyard, and they'd both cried.

Her mother wanted to cry again when Jess requested large Tupperware containers for the bones she'd just exhumed. Generally, Jess's mother was the kind of parent who would let her daughter set the house on fire if she thought it could teach something about carbon and oxygen. But she was stricken with a stab of anxiety: was digging up a beloved pet and macerating its corpse a sign that your child had psychopathic tendencies?

Jess tried her best to explain that she'd dug up Milo because she loved him, and that's why she had to see what his skeleton looked like. Beautiful, as she knew it would be: the swoop of the rib cage, the scoop of the eye sockets.

Jess loved the interior architecture of living things. Ribs, the protective embrace of them, how they hold delicate organisms in a lifelong hug. Eye sockets: no artisan had ever made a more elegant container for a precious thing. Milo's eyes had been the color of smoky quartz. When Jess touched a finger to the declivities on either side of his delicate skull, she could see those eyes again: the kind gaze of her earliest friend, avid for the next game.

She grew up on one of the dense streets of liver-brick bungalows that marched westward with Sydney's first growth spurt in the 1900s. Had she lived in a rural place, she might have exercised her fascination on road-killed kangaroos, wombats, or wallabies. But in inner Sydney, she was lucky to find a dead mouse, or perhaps a bird that flew into a plate-glass window. Her best specimen was a fruit bat that had been electrocuted. She found it on the nature strip under the power lines. She spent a week articulating it: the papery membrane of the wing, unfolding like the pleated bellows of an accordion. The metatarsal bones, like human fingers, but lighter-evolved not to hold and grasp, but to fan the air. When she was done, she suspended it from the light fixture in her bedroom ceiling. There, stripped clean of all that could readily decay, she watched it fly forever through endless nights.

Over time, her bedroom became a mini natural history museum, filled with skeletons of lizards, mice, birds, displayed on plinths fashioned from salvaged wire spools or cotton reels, and identified with carefully inked Latin tags. This did not endear her to the tribe of teenage girls who inhabited her high school. Most of her classmates found her obsession with necrotic matter gross and creepy. She became a solitary teen, which perhaps accounted for her high place in the state in three subjects when the final public exam results were published. She continued to distinguish herself as an undergrad and came to Washington on a scholarship to do her master's in zoology.

It was the kind of thing Australians liked to do: a year or two abroad to take a look at the rest of the world. In her first semester, the Smithsonian hired her as an intern. When they learned she knew how to scrape bones, she was sent to do osteo prep at the Museum of Natural History. It turned out that she had become extremely skilled from working on small species. A blue whale skeleton might impress the public, but Jess and her colleagues knew that a blue wren was far more challenging to articulate.

She loved the term "articulate" because it was so apt: a really good mount allowed a species to tell its own story, to say what it was like when it breathed and ran, dived or soared. Sometimes, she wished she'd lived in the Victorian era, when craftsmen competed to be the best at capturing movement-a horse rearing required an absolute balance in the armature, a donkey turned to scratch its flank demanded a sculptor's sense of curvature. Making these mounts had become a craze among wealthy men of the time, who strove to produce specimens dedicated to beauty and artistry.

Contemporary museums had scant place for that. Mounting bones destroyed information-adding metal, removing tissue-so very few skeletons were articulated. Most bones were prepped, numbered, and then stored away in drawers for comparative measurement or DNA sampling.

When Jess did that work, her nostalgia for the craftsmanship of the past faded, overtaken by her fascination with the science. Every fragment told a story. It was her job to decode them and help scientists extract the testimony from each fossilized chip. The specimens might have come to the museum as the product of dumb luck or the result of days of exacting scientific endeavor. A hobbyist might have stumbled upon a mammoth's tibia uncovered by the lashings of a winter storm. Or a paleontologist might have collected a tiny vole's tooth after weeks of painstaking soil sifting. Jess made her labels on a laser printer and included GPS coordinates for where the specimen had been found. Past curators left a more personal mark, their handwritten cards in sepia-toned ink.

Those nineteenth-century preparators had plied their craft ignorant of DNA and all the vital data it would one day yield. It thrilled Jess to think that when she closed the drawer on a newly filed specimen, it might be opened in fifty or a hundred years by a scientist seeking answers to questions she didn't yet know how to ask, using tools of analysis she couldn't even yet imagine.

She hadn't meant to stay in America. But careers can be as accidental as car wrecks. Just as she graduated, the Smithsonian offered her a four-month contract to go to French Guiana to collect rainforest specimens. Not many girls from Burwood Road in western Sydney got to go to French Guiana and bounce through the rainforest with scorpion specimens pegged across the jeep like so much drying laundry. Another offer followed: Kenya, to compare contemporary species on Mount Kilimanjaro with those gathered by Teddy Roosevelt's expedition a hundred years earlier.

At the end of that trip, Jess was packing her few possessions, ready to go home to get on with what she still considered her real life, when the Smithsonian offered her a permanent position, managing their vertebrate Osteology Prep Lab at the Museum Support Center in Maryland. It was a brand-new facility and the job vacancy was unexpected. The manager who had designed the lab had been struck down by a sudden allergy to frass, the soft, dusty excrement of dermestid beetles. Those beetles were the preferred and best means of bone cleaning, so being unable to work with them without breaking into hives signaled the need for a change of occupation.

The Smithsonian's nickname was "the Attic of America." Support was the attic's attic: a sprawling twelve miles of storage that housed priceless scientific and artistic collections. Jess had thought she wouldn't want to work out in the suburbs, far from the public face of the museum. But when she walked down the vast connecting corridor known as "the street," linking the zigzag of metal-sheathed, climate-controlled buildings in which all kinds of science took place, she knew she'd arrived at the epicenter of her profession.

After her interview she and the director walked across a verdant campus flanked by the botany department's greenhouses. He pointed out a newly built storage pod, looming windowless above the greenhouses. "We just opened that one, to house the wet collection," he said. "After 9/11, we realized it wasn't prudent to have twenty-five million biological specimens in combustible fluids crammed in a basement a couple of blocks from the Capitol. So now they're here."

The Osteo Prep Lab was farther on, in a building of its own, tucked off at the edge of the campus nearest the highway. "If you get, say, an elephant carcass from the National Zoo, it's pungent," the director explained, "so we sited your lab as far from everyone else as possible."

Your lab. Jess hadn't thought of herself as ambitious, but she realized she badly wanted this responsibility. Inside, the lab gleamed: a necropsy suite with a hydraulic table, a two-ton hoist, double bay doors large enough to admit a whale carcass, and a wall of saws and knives worthy of a horror movie. It was the largest facility of its kind in the world, and a far cry from her makeshift lab in the laundry room on Burwood Road.

She loved working there. Every day brought something new in a flow of specimens that never stopped. The latest arrival: a collection of passerines from Kandahar. The birds had been roughed out in the field, most of the feathers and flesh removed. Jess's assistant, Maisy, was bent over the box of little bundles, carefully tied so none of the tiny bones would be lost.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Viking; First Edition (June 14, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399562966
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399562969
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.24 x 1.28 x 9.26 inches
• #26 in Animal Fiction (Books)
• #906 in American Literature (Books)
• #1,117 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Geraldine brooks.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of the novels The Secret Chord, Caleb's Crossing, People of the Book, March (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2006) and Year of Wonders, recently optioned by Olivia Coleman. She has also written three works of non-fiction: Nine Parts of Desire, based on her experiences among Muslim women in the mideast, Foreign Correspondence, a memoir about an Australian childhood enriched by penpals around the world and her adult quest to find them, and The Idea of Home:Boyer Lectures 2011. Brooks started out as a reporter in her hometown, Sydney, and went on to cover conflicts as a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Bosnia, Somalia, and the Middle East. She now lives on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts with two sons, a horse named Valentine and a dog named Bear.

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Customers find the story fascinating and well-written. They describe the writing as gifted and easy to read. Readers appreciate the fascinating information and well researched content. They also find the characters well-developed and sensitive. Customers find themselves emotionally touched, poignant, and heartwarming. They appreciate the well-crafted quality and excellent condition of the book.

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Customers find the story fascinating, vibrant, and imaginative. They appreciate the author's admirable job of fleshing out the story.

"Loved this. Complex, moving, vibrant book . Never really around horses this book was so interesting and so well written it was hard to put down...." Read more

"...The third timeline is a brief but wonderful interlude into contemporary art history ...." Read more

"...This was a wonderfully written story, descriptive and captivating . Horse lovers will enjoy this tale and much of it is rooted in very real history...." Read more

"...It is a beautiful story , especially if you have ever loved (and been loved by) an animal." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book well-written, fantastic, and incredible. They say the author is gifted and keeps the story moving. Readers also mention the book is solid, easy to read, and great for history buffs. They mention it's well-conceived, well-presented, and descriptive.

"...Never really around horses this book was so interesting and so well written it was hard to put down...." Read more

"...Brooks uses her knowledge of this period and her writing skill to portray a beautiful , and at times heartbreaking, relationship between the horse..." Read more

"Overall, I enjoyed this book. This was a wonderfully written story, descriptive and captivating...." Read more

"...the 1850's in Kentucky, and his story lives on today. A beautifully written book " Read more

Customers find the information in the book fascinating, edifying, and well-researched. They describe it as an intellectual page-turner that weaves through the lives of a famous race. Readers also mention the book is an interesting blend of topics and settings, interlaced with accurate and entertaining details of equine medicine.

"Loved this. Complex , moving, vibrant book. Never really around horses this book was so interesting and so well written it was hard to put down...." Read more

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"...The history , the paintings, skeleton bone information were so well researched !Putting it together made for an amazing story!" Read more

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"I don’t think it is a 5 but definitely a 4.5. The characters are very well developed and I found myself vested in the outcome for Jarrett...." Read more

"Slow start, but I loved how the characters developed . I actually like stories that involve multiple eras. This did not disappoint...." Read more

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"...It is the story of loyalty and kindness , of love and evil. Of Northerners and Southerners. Of a man and his father. A man and his horse...." Read more

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"... One tragedy that is angering . Looked up many words! Would recommend highly." Read more

Customers find the book well-crafted, skillfully woven, and emotionally resonant. They also say the perseverance of the horse and trainer is amazing.

"...I do recommend the book to those who appreciate a well-crafted and well-researched historical story." Read more

"...I loved them both. Their perseveriance was amazing ." Read more

"The story of the horse, from the 1800s, is very well done ...." Read more

"...Slavery, unflinching and unnerving as we follow the travels of Lexington’s groom and biggest ally Jarret- aka Warfield’s Jarret or Ten Broeck’s..." Read more

Customers find the book compelling, thrilling, and difficult to put down. They say the characters are not too hard to follow. Readers also mention the transition from one chapter to the next is smooth and not confusing.

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What Makes the Far Right Tick?

In “Stolen Pride,” Arlie Russell Hochschild explores the emotional lives of Americans who vote for Donald Trump.

White supremacists in Pikeville, Ky., in 2017. Credit... Daniel Shular

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By Doug Bock Clark

Doug Bock Clark is a reporter for ProPublica, where he covers politics in the American South. He is also the author of “The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific With a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life.”

• Sept. 10, 2024
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STOLEN PRIDE: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right , by Arlie Russell Hochschild

On an unseasonably hot day in April 2017, a caravan of vehicles full of white supremacists rolled into Pikeville, Ky. The neo-Nazis, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and other self-described racists were emboldened by the election of Donald Trump and dressed to the hilt with jackboots, shields, sunglasses and firearms. They had come to recruit from America’s whitest congressional district, which is also one of its poorest and most conservative.

In “Stolen Pride,” the Berkeley professor emerita Arlie Russell Hochschild uses reactions to the white supremacist march as a window into the political and sociological shifts that have transformed the country. As she writes, “It occurred to me that a close look at this vulnerable patch of red America — Kentucky’s Fifth Congressional District — might offer clues to red America as a whole, and indeed to the winds of white nationalism blowing around the world.”

“Stolen Pride” is a sequel to Hochschild’s lauded “ Strangers in Their Own Land ,” which focused on working-class Louisiana supporters of the Tea Party during the Obama administration. That earlier book arrived in the months before Trump’s 2016 presidential win and was held up as key to understanding the constituency that had sent him to the White House. In her new book, Hochschild delves into Appalachia, the American region featured by Trump’s vice-presidential pick JD Vance in his memoir, “ Hillbilly Elegy .”

This means that “Stolen Pride” will almost certainly be used by commentators to decode the sentiments of conservatives this election too. (Indeed, Hochschild herself launched this process with a recent essay in The Wall Street Journal.) What differentiates “Stolen Pride” from the glut of other commentary on Trump voters is Hochschild’s sustained attention to the economic and cultural factors influencing their emotions — especially their pride and shame. As Hochschild sees it, the residents of Pikeville are trapped in a “pride paradox.”

“On one hand, rural KY-5 Republicans felt fierce pride in hard work and personal responsibility,” she writes. “On the other hand, their beleaguered economy” — hollowed out by the decline of the coal industry, globalization and other economic shifts that favor urban Democratic America — “greatly lowered their chance of success and vulnerability to shame.” Trump, Hochschild theorizes, offered these voters a way out by telling them to be proud of themselves and blame others — liberals, immigrants, the federal government — for their failures.

In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild updates the core of her previous book, what she calls her subjects’ “deep story” — the emotional narrative that they use to explain their lives. In this story, Hochschild explains, white, blue-collar conservatives feel that they had been waiting in line for the American dream only to have Democratic constituencies — educated women and minorities, for example — cut ahead of them. In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild elaborates that those voters saw Barack Obama as a bully helping the line-cutters advance. Trump then emerged as the “good bully” who was strong enough to fight back.

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