Overview
Sex. Money. Horses.
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 us into this strange and seductive world of horse breeding. We meet the world's leading sire, Storm Cat, the Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew, and a nearly unmanageable colt, Devil Begone, who has found peace and prosperity on the banks of the Rio Grande 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.
Synopsis
Sex. Money. Horses.
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 us into this strange and seductive world of horse breeding. We meet the world's leading sire, Storm Cat, the Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew, and a nearly unmanageable colt, Devil Begone, who has found peace and prosperity on the banks of the Rio Grande 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.
Publishers Weekly
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. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewFrom the very title of the book, readers get the sense that Stud is about more than just horses. New Yorker essayist and editor Kevin Conley shows there is money to be made from horses having sex -- or just getting inseminated artificially, for that matter. The sophisticated world of happy horsemanship is a fascinating one indeed -- that is, if cooled horse semen shipped via FedEx in Styrofoam boxes does not make you queasy.
Predicting which horses will have fast offspring is not as easy as it may seem. Though champion thoroughbreds are of undoubtedly good stock, it is sometimes the also-rans that breed Kentucky Derby winners. Stud fees escalate wildly from year to year, with the seed of the top studs sold at exorbitant prices to an exotic international cabal of millionaire gamblers and farm owners. Once the horses' services are bought, the act itself is painstakingly manipulated by human helpers, and even videotaped for protection against potential problems or lawsuits.
Though less inhibited than humans, horses are no less confounding in their mating behavior. The topic is unique, and Stud takes a multifaceted look both at how the horses are primed for the pump and how their humans handle them. Stud does suffer slightly from simple repetition: The underlying humor of the writing is based on the anthropomorphic gaze at horse behavior, and the "tee hee hee" of equine sex is a running joke that tires by the end. Then again, with lines like "Hershey sums up the neighborly disagreement with a fecal briquette" and "This poop-off is followed by a volley of snorts," perhaps we can all afford to chuckle. (Brenn Jones)