Stud: Adventures in Breeding - Hardcover

Kevin Conley is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His writing has appeared in Details, US Weekly, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. He lives in New York.

Funny, insightful and surprisingly engaging, this part travelogue on Kentucky bluegrass country and part guide to equine breeding offers far more than one might initially expect. The world's priciest stud, Storm Cat (a direct descendant of Secretariat), earns a whopping $500,000 per tryst. The randy stallion's "muck" is used by Campbell Soup to fertilize its mushroom fields. Conley, a New Yorker staff writer, takes readers to an auction where two camps a stoic group of Irishmen known in horse circles as "the boys" and a modish collection of sheikhs inexplicably called "the Doobie Brothers" square off on fillies and colts fetching upwards of $3 million. But Conley doesn't stop there: he considers the advancement of civilization through the history of horses. He argues that through horse trading the nomads of Kazakhstan brought their proto-Indo-European language to most of Europe and South Asia. "History had begun," he writes, "built on the way a horse can cover ground." Conley also illustrates the racial and socioeconomic backdrop of horse country with rather telling accounts of the interactions between black and white, blue collar and blueblood that shape the equine community. The upshot is a vividly equine-centric view of social, cultural and economic human history.
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