Thoroughbred Books

I don't know who this book was written for. Racing fans? Sociology professors? Migrant workers? There are many good books about racing that have recently been published. This is not one of them. The book actually has very little to do with racing. It is an indictment of American industrialists. The premise is that very rich families engaged in dubious practices to get and stay rich. Sound interesting? It's not. At least not here.

Save your time and money. Unlike her first book about horse racing ("Down the Backstretch", which is a passable sociological picture of the horse racing business), this one is mostly a pedantic recitation of mind-numbing, frequently-repeated details. It has all the charm and style of a statistics text.

R. G. Denis, The Gambling Times Guide to Thoroughbred Racing (Gambling Times/Lyle Stuart, 1984)

R. G. Denis, the back of this book proclaims, is one of "the world's greatest racing authorities." Which makes me wonder how he can think that a colt becomes a horse "past the age of three" (a colt becomes a horse when he turns five), or that Lexington's 238 winners, "a record not likely to ever be endangered," had already been broken at least once by the time the book was written (Noholme II, who died in 1983, sired two hundred seventy-nine winners; I suspect that Glenelg broke it long before that, but can't find the numbers I need to be sure of that). The complete lack of any link to reality in the book's opening pages casts quite a pall over it. This continues thanks to a large number of errors that may also be factual, but have an equal probability of being typographical.

Still, that's not to say there's nothing here of value. Denis discounts the two most overrated factors in handicapping, weight and workouts, and is one of the few writers before the nineties to have done so. Also, when he finally does get into handicapping (a very, very small portion of this very, very small book; barring examples, about five pages of this book are spent on handicapping discussion), there's some good common-sense stuff that most folks might have picked up on whilst learning themselves, but that I've never seen written in a book before, and I've read a whole lot of handicapping books (there are over a hundred in my bookshelf at home, and add to that those I can get from the local library).

Still, a colt becomes a horse at four? * ½

While this may have been a decent purchase during the Spring of 1998, it no longer is of any value. You may think you are getting a detailed recap of the year in racing. Instead you get a shallow preview of the "upcoming" 1998 races and contenders. Save your money and avoid this one.

This is about the silliest excuse for a children's book I have reviewed in a long time.

The writing is terrible, and the story is not paced for the attention of children. The author has a definite psycho-social agenda, but it will not help your children in either their reading skills or in thinking about places like Big Bone Lick.

This book is "Bad to the Bone".

Ed Gambera, The Unique Way to Make Money at the Racetrack (Hillsdale, 1992)

There are so many things to say about this book that I can honestly say I have no idea where to start. That it was published at all is somewhat amazing to me. Hillsdale is either a name cooked up for a self-publishing deal or a vanity press of the lowest sort, as it's obvious no proofreading was done at all on the manuscript, where at least three or four grammatical errors can be found on each page, and lapses in sentence structure occur almost constantly. Forget about more subtle things like paragraph construction. Amusingly, one can tell where the author invested the text with extra emotion by watching the increase in number of grammatical errors and decrease in coherence. For example, in a passage where Gambera is talking about Andrew Beyer, you can see him getting really het up:

"Most of the top handicappers have written more than one book, and it amazes me, how this elite group keeps praising each other, as to how successful their books are, and as a reader of most of them, I could never win following their methods, because of the technicality and the difficulty to understand what they were preaching.... The readers should also understand, that Beyer and most of the top handicappers, that have published, are usually making money from their royalties, their salaries as writers for newspapers, and from their seminars, and 900 numbers, and not by playing at the racetrack."

I triple-checked that to make sure I had all the commas in the right places. If you were laughing by the time you finished that except, welcome to the club.

Worse, if you can get past the grammatical mess that is this book, Gambera heartily embraces the one mistake that will drive a player to bankruptcy faster than any other: the idea of a horse being due. (If you have the intestinal fortitude to pick this book up, should you come across it, read the section on "missing odd" horses-- yes, that's "missing odd," not "missing odds"-- and do exactly the opposite if you want to preserve a red cent that's in your pocket.)

There might well be some useful information here during those times when Gambera isn't trying to be soon (as in "a fool and his money are soon parted"), but this book was such a painful experience I can't bring myself to try any of it out. Gambera finishes the book with a postscript:

"P:S: I do not intend to write another book so I hope that this one is a winner."

Thank you. We could ask for no less. Half a star because I, for some reason, finished it.