Dark Horses and Black Beauties: Animals, Women, a Passion

In a phenomenon too prevalent to be mere chance, little girls all over the Western world wake one day to find themselves completely taken over by the love of all things equine. They collect model Breyer horses; read books on horse anatomy, evolution, and history; and barely breathe between riding lessons. For some of them, the obsession fades after a few years but returns with a vengeance in middle age. Then there is no stopping them. In fact, the majority of horse owners in countries like the United States and Britain are female, and the explanation turns out to be as full of surprises as the state of affairs it describes.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson delves beneath the shallow hypotheses explaining women's connections to horses to look at how this communication with another animal opens us to a new apprehension of the larger "natural" world. Melding memoir, sociology, history, anecdote, and a bit of prose poetry, Dark Horses and Black Beauties is a unique approach to its subject that also seeks to transcend it, to venture into the dark territory of humankind's relationship with animals -- and thus with itself.