LAUGHING IN THE HILLS

by Bill Barich ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 19, 1980

A somber, obsessive, insidiously involving meditation on modern horseracing and Renaissance Platonism after the model of Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Admittedly, nothing in Barich's paean to the glories of the horse and his pastiche of equine quotations from Renaissance writings has the freshness or intellectual verve of Persig's explorations. But his equation of the human spirit with the heart of the thoroughbred, spelled out in personal terms, does take hold. Barich's mother comes down with a fatal cancer (a recurrent, festering image); then his wife shows a dangerous brain shadow on an X-ray (which proves, after an operation, to be only a shadow). He tries to distract himself by handicapping at the OTB but the attempt founders; only the Daily Racing Form suggests the existence, somewhere, of a healing orderliness that will give him the spiritual life he once felt studying Pico della Mirandola and the humanists in Florence. So Barich packs up and takes off for a summer of handicapping and racetrack life at Golden Gate Fields near San Francisco--pursued by the coyote of death and its ghastly ""laughing in the hills."" At the track, he enters into the lives of trainers, grooms, owners, track announcers, jockeys--and horses. Everything about the horse! its history from earliest bone specimens through domestication to the present, plus the horse during Renaissance times, the history of bloodlines, the rise of breeding, and the racehorse today--its care, feeding, drugging, and training. All of this is interwoven with discussions of Nco-Platonism, Savanorola, Lorenzo de Medici, and the Italian artists. Barich, striving for his rebirth, pulls back from a Hollywood ending; meanwhile his ideas bind your interest and the track journalism is superb.

Pub Date: May 19, 1980

ISBN: 1932910875

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION