Here are 100 books that The Horse fans have personally recommended if you like
The Horse.
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Horses have helped me negotiate the world since early childhood. I’ve worked as a horse trainer, show competitor, catch rider, barn grunt, and riding instructor. As a UCLA-trained brain scientist and full professor, I also taught human perception, language, memory, and thought for almost 25 years.
Combining these interests produced an “aha” moment, leading to my development of brain-based horsemanship. Successful horse-and-human teams require an understanding of how prey and predator brains interact. With that understanding, both species learn to communicate mutually via body language. We humans cooperate in this fashion and degree with no other species of prey animal—it’s a rare and special bond!
This book surveys and explores the facts behind how horses perceive and think. Leblanc was the first to collect equine research that explores the horse’s mentality. It’s one of the academic references that helped me create, test, and apply my ideas for my own book. I like the way he pulls research together and presents it with care and accuracy.
Horses were first domesticated about 6,000 years ago on the vast Eurasian steppe extending from Mongolia to the Carpathian Mountains. Yet only in the last two decades have scientists begun to explore the specific mental capacities of these animals. Responding to a surge of interest in fields from ethology to comparative psychology and evolutionary biology, Michel-Antoine Leblanc presents an encyclopedic synthesis of scientific knowledge about equine behavior and cognition. The Mind of the Horse provides experts and enthusiasts alike with an up-to-date understanding of how horses perceive, think about, and adapt to their physical and social worlds.
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Horses have helped me negotiate the world since early childhood. I’ve worked as a horse trainer, show competitor, catch rider, barn grunt, and riding instructor. As a UCLA-trained brain scientist and full professor, I also taught human perception, language, memory, and thought for almost 25 years.
Combining these interests produced an “aha” moment, leading to my development of brain-based horsemanship. Successful horse-and-human teams require an understanding of how prey and predator brains interact. With that understanding, both species learn to communicate mutually via body language. We humans cooperate in this fashion and degree with no other species of prey animal—it’s a rare and special bond!
Horses have been helping humans build civilization since the time of their domestication at least 6,000 years ago. This book analyzes the horse’s contribution to construction, transportation, military warfare, hunting, food, therapy, frontier expedition, and more. Interesting in its own right, it also taught me to look with new eyes at the modern cities and towns, the farmland and infrastructure, even the art and music, that humans created only with the cooperation of their horses. I enjoyed thinking about how both Western and Eastern societies have horses as their common cornerstone.
Man has always been fascinated by Equus caballus, recasting horse power into many forms: a hunk of meat, an industrial and agricultural machine, a luxury good, a cherished dancer, a comrade in arms and a symbol of a mythical past. From the wild tarpans sought by the Nazis to jade-laden treasure steeds in Ancient China, broken-down nags recycled into sausages and furniture stuffing, stallions that face fighting bulls and brewery horses that charmed the founder of the Sikh Empire, The Age of the Horse knits the history of the horse into that of humans, through revolution, war, social change and…
Horses have helped me negotiate the world since early childhood. I’ve worked as a horse trainer, show competitor, catch rider, barn grunt, and riding instructor. As a UCLA-trained brain scientist and full professor, I also taught human perception, language, memory, and thought for almost 25 years.
Combining these interests produced an “aha” moment, leading to my development of brain-based horsemanship. Successful horse-and-human teams require an understanding of how prey and predator brains interact. With that understanding, both species learn to communicate mutually via body language. We humans cooperate in this fashion and degree with no other species of prey animal—it’s a rare and special bond!
The beautiful true story of Eddie Sweat, the groom who bonded with Secretariat for life throughout the horse’s racing career, stallion service, and retirement. Sweat was the son of a tenant farmer in South Carolina, the sixth of nine children in a poor family. His daily efforts and devotion to the finest racehorse of all time were largely ignored until this book came out in 2007 long after Secretariat died. This story took me for a heartwarming ride that reminded me of true horsemanship and the roles of the most important (but lowest paid) people on a performance horse’s successful team.
Most of us know the legend of Secretariat, the tall, handsome chestnut racehorse whose string of honours runs long and rich: the only two-year-old ever to win Horse of the Year, in 1972; winner in 1973 of the Triple Crown, his times in all three races still unsurpassed; featured on the cover of "Time", "Newsweek", and "Sports Illustrated"; the only horse listed on ESPN's top fifty athletes of the twentieth century (ahead of Mickey Mantle). His final race at Toronto's Woodbine Racetrack is a touchstone memory for horse lovers everywhere. Yet while Secretariat will be remembered forever, one man, Eddie…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
Horses have helped me negotiate the world since early childhood. I’ve worked as a horse trainer, show competitor, catch rider, barn grunt, and riding instructor. As a UCLA-trained brain scientist and full professor, I also taught human perception, language, memory, and thought for almost 25 years.
Combining these interests produced an “aha” moment, leading to my development of brain-based horsemanship. Successful horse-and-human teams require an understanding of how prey and predator brains interact. With that understanding, both species learn to communicate mutually via body language. We humans cooperate in this fashion and degree with no other species of prey animal—it’s a rare and special bond!
A
collection of stories written by respected authors explaining how horses help
their everyday lives. Jane Smiley, Maggie Shipstead, and Carmen Maria Machado
are all here, along with many other excellent women writers. I feel deep
appreciation and respect for all the horses I have known—especially those who
taught me the most painful lessons, and even the few who taught in a painful or
frightening way. Every horse is unique, and every horse offers something you
can’t get anywhere else. It was magical to read what some of the world’s best
writers have to say about the bonds they created with their own mounts.
“A wild, rollicking ride into the heart of horse country—these essays get at what it means to love horses, in all that love's complexity.” —Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
A compelling and provocative essay collection that smashes stereotypes and redefines the meaning of the term “horse girl,” broadening it for women of all cultural backgrounds.
As a child, horses consumed Halimah Marcus’ imagination. When she wasn’t around horses she was pretending to be one, cantering on two legs, hands poised to hold invisible reins. To her classmates, girls like Halimah were known as “horse girls,”…
I like trying to solve problems about the mind: Is the mind just the brain? What is consciousness, and where is it in the brain? What happens in the brain during aesthetic experience? Why are we prone to self-deception? In approaching these questions, I don’t limit myself to one discipline or set of techniques. These mental phenomena, and the problems that surround them, do not hew to our disciplinary boundaries. In spite of this, someone needs to collect, analyze, and assess information relevant to the problems—which is in many different formats—and build theories designed to make sense of it. During that time, more data will become available, so back you go.
Anjan Chatterjee has managed to write a book that a) is very accessible, b) provides thorough coverage of current attempts to understand art and aesthetic experience by using information from the cognitive sciences, and c) outlines an original hypothesis about why humans evolved a love for art. That last part changes the book from a nice review of the topic to a groundbreaking attempt at an explanation of our art practices.
Chatterjee examines our judgments of peoples’ attractiveness, the brain’s system of reward chemicals, and our evolutionary history, in an attempt to understand our passion for art scientifically.
In an upcoming book on art, I refer to Chatterjee frequently. I don’t always agree with him, but his sensible, clear, and broad approach made his book very useful to me.
The Aesthetic Brain takes readers on an exciting journey through the world of beauty, pleasure, and art. Using the latest advances in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Anjan Chatterjee investigates how an aesthetic sense is etched into our minds, and explains why artistic concerns feature centrally in our lives. Along the way, Chatterjee addresses such fundamental questions as: What is beauty? Is it universal? How is beauty related to pleasure? What is art? Should art be beautiful? Do we have an instinct for art?
Early on, Chatterjee probes the reasons why we find people, places, and even numbers beautiful, highlighting the…
I’m working with others to develop what we call a religious naturalist orientation or an ecospiritual orientation, and these books have deeply guided my path and inspired the writing of my own book.
Philosopher Loyal Rue, an important mentor of mine, coined and developed the concept that our science-based understandings of cosmic, planetary, and biological evolution represent Everybody’s Story, a notion he first proposed in Amythia: Crisis in the Natural History of Western Culture. He writes with lucidity, grace, and deep wisdom, and is frequently quoted in my book.
This exhilarating tale of natural history illuminates the evolution of matter, life, and consciousness. In Everybody’s Story, Loyal Rue finds the means for global solidarity and cooperation in the shared story of humanity.
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I am an evolutionary ecologist with a lifelong fascination with mating behavior in animals, particularly fishes. The core of my doctoral thesis was trying to understand why some males mate with females of a different species, a behavior that I thought could not be adaptive. This was the starting point of my work on male mate choice, but also mate choice more generally. Originally from Germany, I have lived and worked in the US for a long time. Most of my work is on neotropical fishes so moving to America made sense.
When Darwin proposed the two mechanisms of sexual selection, one was almost immediately embraced by his Victorian contemporaries: male competition. Female choice, on the other hand, had to wait almost 100 years to be fully recognized. This book is an account of the history of female choice and provides fascinating insights into the development of a scientific discipline and how it is intertwined with society. Well written and very accessible, this is a great read.
Why do female animals select certain mates, and how do scientists determine the answer? In considering these questions, Erika Lorraine Milam explores the fascinating patterns of experiment and interpretation that emerged as twentieth-century researchers studied sexual selection and female choice. Approaching the topic from both biological and animal-studies perspectives, Milam not only presents a broad history of sexual selection-from Darwin to sociobiology-but also analyzes the animal-human continuum from the perspectives of sex, evolution, and behavior. She asks how social and cultural assumptions influence human-animal research and wonders about the implications of gender on scientific outcomes. Although female choice appears to…
Raised in an atheist family, I came to faith in Christ in middle age and am now devoted to spreading the Gospel. I am a PhD biochemist and the author of the award-winning The Works of His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith. I was a professor at three major universities and held leadership positions at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. I have published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, as well as articles on science and faith. I serve as the Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly magazine God and Nature. My passion is to proclaim the harmony between science and Christianity.
This book by James Stump is a landmark work that contains the best amalgam of philosophy, science, and theology that I have come across.
I was strongly moved by the many discussions of the role of change (exemplified by biological evolution) in our world. Stump discusses how science itself, as much as the subjects of scientific enquiry, changes and ties this in with the theological implications of biblical/scientific interactions.
The book covers a great deal of ground as the chain of the title weaves into the problem of evil, the origins of humanity, the definition of the soul, and a lot more. It is all beautifully written and highly accessible, as well as accurate and thorough throughout.
Many readers will know the author from the high-quality podcast, “The Language of God.” Reading this book, one can almost hear Stump’s melodious voice as he discusses the science of God’s creation with…
“In this marvelously accessible book, philosopher-Christian Jim Stump provides the reader with new eyes for a journey through time, the origin of the soul, suffering, and morality, and reveals how the latest scientific findings about what it means to be human have led him to a deeper and more authentic faith.”—Francis S. Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project and Founder of BioLogos, author of The Language of God
A thought-provoking and eye-opening work by Jim Stump, Vice President at BioLogos and host of the Language of God podcast, offering a compelling argument about how evolution does not have to…
Before becoming an author, I’d dabbled in almost every other genre—science fiction, western, coming-of-age, fantasy, and the like. When I wrote, published, and won awards for my first two mystery thrillers, I felt like I had finally found my niche with mystery readers. Good writers are good readers, so for years, I read only the genre for which I was writing. After a time, all those mysteries started to become rather formulaic, so I decided to branch out into other genres I used to enjoy. When I heard that other mystery fans were experiencing “genre burnout,” I built this list to encourage them to enjoy the fruits of all genres.
Hudspeth’s debut novel is a compelling fictional biography that blends historical fiction with dark academia—and is a work of anatomical art.
The Resurrectionist is one-part biography of surgeon and anatomist-turned-madman Dr. Spencer Black, one-part a collection of anatomical illustrations of mythological beasts—and a theory that links them with the origins of humankind.
I love a dense and gritty biography (even a fictional one), and this rich account of Dr. Black’s descent from a learned anatomical theorist to a raving lunatic gave me wonderful ideas for the fates of my own characters. My eyes were glued to the author’s anatomical artwork for hours after finishing the story, resulting in a book that kept me hidden in its pages well after my bedtime.
Philadelphia. The late 1870s. A city of cobblestone sidewalks and horse-drawn carriages. Home to the famous anatomist and surgeon Dr. Spencer Black. The son of a "resurrectionist" (aka grave robber), Dr. Black studied at Philadelphia's esteemed Academy of Medicine, where he develops an unconventional hypothesis: What if the world's most celebrated mythological beasts - mermaids, minotaurs, and satyrs - were in fact the evolutionary ancestors of humankind? "The Resurrectionist" offers two extraordinary books in one. The first is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from his humble beginnings to the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life. The…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
I’ve been mad about dinosaurs and ancient life since I was seven. I have been amazingly lucky to be able to develop a career as a professional palaeontologist and to be able to research and talk about the subject. We were first to show the original colours of dinosaur feathers, and this discovery provides a perfect way to open the discussion about how palaeontologists know what they say they know. In my books, I seek to amaze, amuse and inform. I have written many books, including pop science, textbooks, technical-scientific works, and books for children, and every year brings new discoveries to be transmitted to the world.
This is about dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts, but it’s unique and unusual.
Author Dean Lomax has run to ground some of the most extraordinary fossils ever found, and artist Bob Nicholls turns them into stunning reconstructions. Here you can read about a beetle within a lizard within a snake, a giant beaver that made huge corkscrew burrows 3 meters deep, the mammal that ate dinosaurs, insects caught in the act of mating, and dinosaurs with cancer.
What I like is that, weird and wonderful as each story may be, each is based strictly on the fossils and reasonable interpretations of those fossils. Dinosaurs may spark the imagination, but as scientists, it’s important to show people how we come to our conclusions, and that needs evidence and reason in a discussion.
Fossils allow us to picture the forms of life that inhabited the earth eons ago. But we long to know more: how did these animals actually behave? We are fascinated by the daily lives of our fellow creatures-how they reproduce and raise their young, how they hunt their prey or elude their predators, and more. What would it be like to see prehistoric animals as they lived and breathed?
From dinosaurs fighting to their deaths to elephant-sized burrowing ground sloths, this book takes readers on a global journey deep into the earth's past. Locked in Time showcases fifty of the…
