Akron Public Library

A traveling circus accidentally leaves behind a baby zebra. The baby is then rescued by horse farmer Nolan Walsh, who takes him home to his young daughter Channing. "Stripes" is soon introduced to the farm's misfit troupe of barnyard residents. The Walsh farm borders the Turfway Racetrack, where highly skilled thoroughbreds compete for the ultra-prestigious Kentucky Crown. From the first moment Stripes lays eyes on the track, he's hooked. He knows...

Bill Barich burst onto the literary scene more than twenty-five years ago with this remarkable account of racetrack life. Holed up in a cheap motel in Albany, California, only a few miles from Golden Gate Fields, he looked to the track to help him make sense of his life during a dark peiod of loss and challenge. With rare sensitivity, he captured the gritty world of the backstretch, and also its poetry, as few other writers have done. Laughing in...

Renowned horse breeder and occasional matchmaker Devin Baldwin pairs eligible young ladies with suitable gentlemen based on his theory of animal magnetism. Amanda Locke, the daughter of a duke, is everything a nobleman could desire, yet she enters her third Season still searching for a match. When an earl passionate about horses becomes the target of her husband hunt, Amanda knows it's time to overcome her fear of riding. With her sister-in-law Ophelia...

"Seven years ago, Miles Pussett was a steeplechase jockey, loving the rush of the race. But after an unfortunate event, he left horseracing behind and swore he would never return. Now he gets his adrenaline rush from riding headfirst down the Cresta Run, a three-quarter-mile Swiss ice chute, reaching speeds of up to eighty miles per hour. Finding himself in St Moritz during the same weekend as White Turf, when high-class horseracing takes place on...

Ian perseveres in his search into the past; discovering the hate that builds silently through the years, the terrible price the relatives pay for their fathers' sins, and a twisted knot of passion compelled to turn love to punishment.

A story, based on real events, about a boy and a half-Arabian mare who enter the Palio, an annual race in Siena, Italy, with all the pageantry of a medieval contest.

"At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to "the world's longest, toughest horse race"--an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. Riders often spend years preparing to...

Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise. Plant tells Jury of something he overheard in The Grave Maurice, a pub near the hospital. A woman told an intriguing story about a girl named Nell Ryder, granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in Cambridgeshire,...

Thirteen stories on horse racing. In Blind Chance, a blind boy discovers a scheme by crooks to rig bets, while in Carrot for a Chestnut, life punishes a jockey who drugs his horse.

Examines the evolution of sports marketing through the lives of Dan Patch and the three men who owned him: an Indiana breeder, Dan Messner; M. E. Sturgis, who sold the horse for $20,000 (a fortune in those days) and spent the rest of his life trying to buy him back; and Marion W. Savage of Minneapolis, whose entrepreneurial skills presaged todays sports marketing geniuses.