Great Horses

In The Horse God Built, best-selling equestrian writer Lawrence Scanlan has written a tribute to an exceptional man that is also a backroads journey to a corner of the racing world rarely visited. As a young black man growing up in South Carolina, Eddie Sweat struggled at several occupations before settling on the job he was born for - groom to North America's finest racehorses. As Secretariat's groom, loyal friend, and protector, Eddie understood the horse far better than anyone else.

In the late 1980s, a spectacular three-year-old female racehorse named Winning Colors was being groomed for success under her famous Hollywood trainer D. Wayne Lukas and the billionaire owner of the San Diego Chargers pro-football team Eugene Klein. Meanwhile, three fun-loving gamblers Miami Paul, Dino Mateo, and Big Bernie believed that Winning Colors could be the unlikely female winner of the 1988 Kentucky Derby.

Great Horse Racing Mysteries digs beneath the surface of some of the sport's most intriguing cases.

Down swept the Vikings from the frigid North. Across the English coastlands and countryside they raided, torched, murdered, and destroyed all in their path. Farmers, monks, and soldiers all fell bloody under the Viking sword, hammer, and axe. Then, when the hour was most desperate, came an unlikely hero. King Alfred rallied the battered and bedraggled kingdoms of Britain and after decades of plotting, praying, and persisting, finally triumphed over the invaders.

Outback horseman Lane Dimity is one of the most powerful social media personalities on the planet. Although unable to speak since the tragedy that took place on his eighth birthday, his words reach out across the world, changing lives. When he learns that more than a thousand stallions have been bred by the U.S. pharmaceutical company Pilatos, he is determined to free them. The heir to Pilatos, Karen Lawford, will do everything in her power to stop him. Pilatos has gambled its future on the revolutionary drug Stablex, and the genetically unique stallions are needed to produce it...and there...

The young riders of Sunhaven Downs in outback Australia overcome everything life throws at them with intelligence and humour, but how will they endure the very annoying city cousin who has come to stay for a year? Although teens Dane and Lani and their ten-year-old brother Matthew try to welcome Amy, she seems determined to ruin their lives when she declares she hates horses and detests everything about the outback. What they don’t know is that Amy has a secret – a secret that will save their lives on the night of the great storm… but not all will survive. In the darkness as the ...

Frankel was born on 11th February 2008, with four white socks and a blaze, from impressive equine lines on both his parents’ sides. Simon Cooper revisits the whole of the horse’s life, giving listeners an inside tour of the calm oasis that is life on a stud farm, where a foal will live with his mother for the first year of his life. Next, the atmosphere of heady possibility that marks the early days of training. Roadwork. Gallops. Trials. Turning raw potential into something more. Frankel begins to set himself apart.

Horses of the Fire is the third book of The Outback Riders series. The teens of Sunhaven in outback Queensland are ayear older and are home for the school holidays to face a wild ride of adventures. The outback has been burning and they are determined to find the arsonist, but the mystery becomes life threatening as they become the target of the fires. Once more, the magic and the mystery of the Min Min lights step in to help them. The rollercoaster of happenings on their holiday plummets and soars time and again, and the Min Min can't save them from everything. Growing up means coming to ...

Henry Lee learnt to ride before he was five, joined Washington's Army at nineteen, and was appointed Captain of the Fifth Troop of Virginia Dragoons at twenty. At twenty-two, Colonel Lee took command of a mixed cavalry and infantry unit known as "Lee's Legion"—the finest offensive team in the Continental Army. Nicknamed "Light-Horse Harry" for his raids on British supply wagons, the young Virginian quickly earned a reputation for horsemanship and distinguished himself as one of the most skilled and courageous cavalry officers of the American Revolution.

Most mercenary units fly flags on two flagpoles at their headquarters: one with their unit’s flag, and other bearing the flag of their current employer. However, the Third Regimental Combat Team—a.k.a. the Eridani Light Horse—leaves one flagpole bare, as a reminder of the death of the Star League, and the other pole flies the Light Horse’s unit and regimental flags at half-mast.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull: Their names are iconic, their significance in American history undeniable. Together, these two Lakota chiefs, one a fabled warrior and the other a revered holy man, crushed George Armstrong Custer’s vaunted Seventh Cavalry. Yet their legendary victory at the Little Big Horn has overshadowed the rest of their rich and complex lives. Now, based on years of research and drawing on a wealth of previously ignored primary sources, award-winning author Mark Lee Gardner delivers the definitive chronicle, thrillingly told, of these extraordinary Indigenous leaders.

The story of noble Black Beauty is one of the most popular children's books of all time. In this sensitive children's adaptation, Beauty movingly describes the friends, people, and places - good and bad - that he encounters in the course of his dramatic life as he is passed from master to master.

The father of the Kentucky Derby called him "the greatest all-around Thoroughbred in American racing history". Sportswriter Grantland Rice simply called him "the greatest racehorse". Now Eliza McGraw tells the story of how a gangling, long-shot Kentucky Derby winner named Exterminator became one of the most beloved racehorses of all time.

Christians are beginning to recognise that we are living in the last days of the end-times and believe that Jesus Christ will soon appear! While we know that He will come and take us to be with Him (commonly known as the 'rapture'), we also know that Christ will come back again with tens of thousands of His holy ones to establish His reign on earth for 1000 years. Who are these holy ones who will return with Him? I believe these are the Overcomers who are written about in Chapters 2 & 3 of The Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ (last book in the bible). I believe they come from every ...

From William Shakespeare’s series of history dramas, to Sir Walter Scott, and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire—not to mention the smash-hit TV show Game of Thrones—the British civil war of 1455 to 1485 has inspired writers for centuries. Ed West’s My Kingdom for a Horse illuminates the bloody war fought for thirty long years between the descendants of King Edward III in a battle for the throne.

Hereby begins the noble tale of young Rhys, a page for Morgana le Fae, who is chosen to compete for the honor of becoming a Son of the Round Table. He’s been learning the sword, the spear, and the shield, and seeks to use them for a higher purpose—especially as Mordred, the son of King Arthur, gathers his forces with a plan to usurp his father’s throne. But as Rhys bravely obeys King Arthur’s call to arms, he must leave his beloved Naida behind—a faerie who warns that supernatural forces are crossing into the Earth realm. Indeed, a magical kingdom from just beyond the veil has ...

SOMETHING'S DIFFERENT ABOUT JONAH Other Civil War re-enactors thought all along there was something different about Jonah the way he corrected the placement of a line of Confederate riflemen, the way he took apart and reassembled an old cannon with ease, the way he walked over the battlefield like he'd been there before. Their suspicions were confirmed when he started firing live ammo into the Yankee lines. Find out if there are any additional casualties at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads more than 150 years after the last shots were fired. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? In the deepest mud at the...

Bill was massive. He had power, intelligence, and unmatched courage. In performance and character he stood above all the other 200,000 Australian horses sent to the Middle East in the Great War. But as war horses go he had one serious problem. No one could ride him but one man - Major Michael Shanahan. Some even thought Bill took a sneering pleasure in watching would-be riders hit the dust. Bill the Bastard is the remarkable tale of a bond between a determined trooper and his stoic but cantankerous mount. They fought together.

Jasper looks like any other average teenage boy but looks can often be deceiving. Jasper holds a deep secret; only he and two of his sisters know about his secret. He must keep this secret from his school at all costs. Jasper is outnumbered; he lives with his six teenage sisters and his mother. The story includes adventure, family situations, secrets and a little romance. Then there are those nuns to tend with and where do they fit into all this?

The Great Match Race is a captivating account of America's first sports spectacle, a horse race that pitted North against South in three grueling heats. On a bright afternoon in May 1823, an unprecedented sixty thousand people showed up to watch two horses run the equivalent of nine Kentucky Derbys in a few hours' time. Eclipse was the majestic champion representing the North, and Henry, an equine arriviste, was the pride of the South.