Mike Sullivan spent three decades in a press box, and late in his life his son asked what he remembered best out of all of it. The answer was not a championship or a scandal. It was a horse: he had been at Secretariat's Derby, in '73, and the word he reached for was beauty. John Jeremiah Sullivan did not know what his father meant, not really, and this audiobook is nine hours of him finding out, traveling from prehistoric caves to the Kentucky Derby in pursuit of what Edwin Muir called our long-lost archaic companionship with the horse.
The Review
Notes of a Sportswriter's Son is the subtitle, and you will not find it anywhere on this listing. A 2012 response quotes the full title while describing the book in three parts: an exploration of the horse as literary motif, a son's love poem for his dead father, and a gifted writer's first attempt to wrestle a talent into book length. All three are accurate, and the missing subtitle is doing real work inside them. Blood Horses on its own promises a racing book. The longer version tells you the truth, which is that the horses are the route the son takes toward the father.
Secretariat's Derby is the hinge and it is nowhere near the subject. What the book does instead is move between registers without announcing the change: a stretch of natural history out of the prehistoric caves, a stretch of racing reportage from behind the scenes, a stretch of family memoir. Sullivan's method is essayistic in the old sense, which means the connections get made by the writer in front of you rather than declared in an introduction and then illustrated. When it works, and it works often, you get the sensation of watching somebody think at full speed. When it does not, the thread you believed you were following goes missing for a while.
Why Listen to Blood Horses
Kentucky runs through a good deal of it, and a 2018 response gives the clearest account of the reading experience anywhere on the page: bought for the horses, stayed for everything else, laughed out loud in places, cried in others, finished the whole thing in a day. That response also names the two poles the book swings between, the father in the press box and the animal in prehistory, and it picks out the recounting of Secretariat's Triple Crown as the high point. If you want a single paragraph to tell you whether this book is for you, that is the paragraph.
Random House Audio put the author at the microphone, and on this book that is more than a convention. The engine of the entire thing is a sentence somebody else said: a father's answer, delivered late, about one afternoon at the races. The son spent two years chasing down what the answer meant, wrote a book out of the chase, and now says that line aloud in his own voice. It is a structural decision rather than a performance one, because the book is written toward the person who said it, and a hired reader would place a stranger between the address and the man it is aimed at. Nine hours and twelve minutes is also, for what it is worth, a length that suits an essayist: long enough to wander, short enough that the wandering stays deliberate.
The Caveats
Readers arriving for the racing should know what they are buying. The lowest grade on the page, two stars, arrives with the question a class asked after being assigned the book: why did the author write this? The family behind that response boards Thoroughbreds, so they came in knowing the business, and the complaint is not ignorance. It is that the book declines to be about the thing it appears to be about. I happen to think the declining is the point, and I also think the objection works as fair warning: if you want the industry explained, the pedigrees traced and the economics laid out, this will feel like a long detour through somebody else's family.
Equus caballus is how the description names the animal, and that Latin is a fair signal of the register. This is prose with ambition in it, praised on the listing by way of a comparison to Moby-Dick as edited by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the kind of blurb that sets an expectation a book then has to survive. Sullivan's sentences run long and the structure is associative, and in audio you cannot see a section break coming the way your eye catches one on a page. Listeners who want clear chapter architecture will find this loose, and the looseness is something the book has been praised for rather than an accident of drafting.
Should You Listen to Blood Horses?
Horse people and essay people are both served here, and they will value different halves of it. Say yes when you read for voice rather than for information, when a writer's digression is the pleasure rather than the delay, and when a book that is honestly about grief while appearing to be about racing sounds like something you want in your ears. One response describes exactly that conversion: it came for the behind-the-scenes account of the sport, and found that the study of how people and horses have lived alongside each other through history was the part that took hold and would not let go.
Racing books are usually about money or about winning, and this one is about neither. Take a pass when you want the sport documented, because the documentary passages here are in service of something else entirely and the book never apologizes for it. Same when an essay that keeps changing subject is not how you want to spend a week of listening. The response predicting that the author was about to become an important American writer reads now like a well-placed bet, and this is the book where you can hear that happening in real time. Beauty is the word the father used, and the son spent two years and an entire book working out what he meant by it.
Is the audiobook a horse racing book?
Partly. The Kentucky Derby and Secretariat are both in it, and so is a great deal of natural history reaching back to prehistoric caves, plus a family memoir running underneath. The listing's Equestrian Sports tag covers roughly a third of what you are buying. Treat the racing as the entrance rather than the subject.
How long is the audiobook, and does it follow a clear structure?
Nine hours and twelve minutes, arranged associatively rather than as a straight narrative. The description calls it a mix of memoir and reportage, which is accurate, and it means sections change subject without a great deal of signposting. In audio that asks more of your attention than a chronological account of the same material would.
What recognition did the book receive?
The listing names three markers: a 2004 Whiting Writers' Award, a National Magazine Award, and selection as a Book of the Year by The Economist. Between them they describe a title recognized as writing rather than as sports coverage, which is a useful signal about the kind of reading experience waiting for you.
