Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History

Ulrich Raulff, author of Farewell to the Horse, is extremely verbose: his book is nearly four-hundred-fifty pages, of which sixty pages are notes and references referred to by superscript numbers throughout the text. His extremely detailed research is formidable and commendable. But whom did he envision as his readership for this massive volume? Certainly not academia—this book would not be of any interest to scientists involved with horses. Equestrians? Not likely. No matter how fascinated readers are with horses, they would lose interest very quickly. Raulff’s writing is not very good. It feels like he is writing in the 1800s: very verbose, using difficult sentence structures, difficult words, making reading slow and laborious. Yet he has written about every aspect of the horse during the last six-thousand years since humans first domesticated it. This book looks more like detailed notes of the author’s research rather than something to be read, learned from, and enjoyed. He adds plenty of his own philosophy, Greek mythology, adulteresses, and so on. There are many small, historic photos included and two sets of bound-in color photos, mostly related to horses but many not (Goethe’s writing stool, e.g.). Raulff prefers length to quality.