Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004
Their Ignorance and Majesty
By Christopher Benfey
Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son
by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pp., $24.00
Most Americans are at least a century removed from their dependence on horses. It is tempting to try to assign a precise date to the seismic shift to horseless carriages. Willa Cather sets her novella 'Coming, Aphrodite!' in 1906, 'almost the very last summer of the old horse stages on Fifth Avenue,' when the intruding automobile, 'mis-shapen and sullen,' seemed 'an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and beautiful and alive.'[1] John Jeremiah Sullivan, who has much to say on the subject in his book Blood Horses, puts the date at 1913, 'when Ford began using interchangeable parts.'
Review, 3425 words
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