Stud: Adventures in Breeding |  | Author: Kevin Conley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Category: Book
List Price: $27.99
Buy New: $11.41
as of 11/23/2009 18:30 MST details
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 2347802
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 4th printing
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 0747560064
Dewey Decimal Number: 636
EAN: 9780747560067
ASIN: 0747560064
Publication Date: July 8, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The most expensive thirty seconds in sports. Every year, on Valentine's Day, the great Thoroughbred farms open their breeding sheds and begin their primary business. For the next one hundred and fifty days, the cries of stallions and the vigorous encouragement of their handlers echo through breeding country, from the gentle hills of Kentucky to the rich valleys of California. Stud takes you into this strange and seductive world. We move from Lexington's Overbrook Farm, where the world's leading sire, Storm Cat, a lightly raced eighteen-year-old, brings in around thirty million dollars a year; to the auction halls, where sheiks and Irish bookies (known more casually as the Doobie Brothers and the Boys) bid millions for Storm Cat's well-bred offspring. We visit Three Chimneys, where the twenty-seven-year-old Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew, a senior citizen by equine standards, makes a rousing return to active duty after spinal surgery, and stroll through Running Horse Farm, on the banks of the Rio Grande, where a nearly unmanageable colt, Devil Begone, has found peace and prosperity servicing desert mares like Patty O'Furniture. Cheap stud, top stud, old stud, wild stud, from the Hall of Fame horse to the harem stallion with his feral herd, Stud looks at intimate acts in idyllic settings (and the billion-dollar business behind them), providing a voyeuristic glimpse of just how human the equine world can be.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
 Eye-opening! May 17, 2009
Fern E. Aron (Knoxville, TN)
If you love to read about horses, you'll love this one. It is the good, the bad and the ugly about the racehorse industry! Very informative and a very quick read.
 Breaks Well and then Fades May 11, 2009
C. Rancour (Houston, TX United States)
Firstly this book was written to be entertaining. It was not written by a man who works in the breeding industry and he is not trying to teach you how to start your own farm. This book is not going to impart the secret recipe to a champion. If I recall correctly I the author is a reporter of some sort.
What the book might do is help you to pass a few hours. It's a light-hearted, easy-to-read book. I thought that the beginning was especially good, but as the book progressed it started to lose it's zing.
I would recommend checking it out of the library for a fun read, but I would not buy this book myself.
Not bad. Not great, but not bad. March 25, 2008
Robert P. Beveridge (Cleveland, OH)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Kevin Conley, $tud: Adventures in Breeding (Bloomsbury, 2002)
"The most expensive thirty seconds in sports," the single line on the back of the book tells us, pointedly printed over the hindquarters part of a full-jacket photograph of Storm Cat, the most expensive American sire in history. New Yorker writer Kevin Conley takes us on a tour through the wild, weird world of horse breeding (mostly Thoroughbred, but a chapter is devoted to Standardbreds as well), and we get to meet a lot of very interesting people along the way, as well as the horses themselves. For wildness and weirdness, it can't be beat, as far as horse books I've read go; for writing, it's a bit different. I rush to say I may be affected by my recent reading here. I just finished up Bill Barich's most recent treatise on the racing world, and pretty much any racing writer would be hard-pressed to fill Barich's estimable writing slippers; everything else reads like Edward D. Wood, Jr., compared to Evelyn Waugh. Still, if you're interested in what goes on behind the camera (as it were) in the racing world, you could do a lot worse than to check out Conley's book. ***
 Interesting, fun read but factually flawed January 1, 2008
Dr. Laura, DVM (College Station, TX United States)
"Stud, adventures in breeding" is a well-written book that focuses as much or more on the human stories within the Thoroughbred breeding industry as on the equine aspect. One of the things that makes horse racing interesting is that every horse has a great human story behind it and the author skillfully impliments this fact. While the book is a good source of general, "inside information" and entertaining stories, it is certainly not an entirely accurate reference. Factual errors are common, distressing considering that the author is an editor of the New Yorker and contributes to a number of large publications. Smallish errors are more common, for example, the listing of Secretariat's syndication value as 5 million dollars rather than the actual figure of slightly over 8 million dollars. The bigger errors are more glaring. The most obvious to me is the report of the death during foaling of a prominent Standardbred broodmare. During my tenure as a farm veterinarian at Hanover, Daisy Harbor continued to produce healthy foals - something that would have been difficult for her to do post-mortem.
All in all, I recommend this book as a light-hearted look at what happens when the top racehorse de jour retires "to the breeding shed." There is more to it than girls, grass and money.
Funny,Interesting way to introduce horse racing/breeding May 1, 2007
Squeakey (Dont waste your time land)
I don't know much about horses,I live in a place where owning one means you have the space,money, and can accomodate them to the colder climate. Needless to say, I went into this book knowing very little about them let alone what it takes to make a champion racehorse.
However, by the time I got done reading this book I was able to inform other people on horses in general and breeding them. I enjoyed reading it, Conley makes the whole business entertaining and practical for anyone to understand. I couldn't put the book down, everyday when I was finished with what had to be done life-wise I read this book. Despite this factor there are a few things in the book that one had to either know offhand or research. This is the only reason why it didn't get five stars from me.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
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