MixedThe Wall Street Journal[Raulff’s] zeal for horses and his admiration for their gifts propel him and the reader through a long, complicated, somewhat disjointed . . . what? History? Treatise? Memorial? Tribute? Eulogy? Farewell to the Horse is all of those things and something of a love letter besides … Mr. Raulff admits that this last section is not a classical ending with a summary or a synthesis. He has ‘no conclusion, but rather a collection: a loose anthology of possibilities and ways of narrating the history of horses and people.’ After reading more than 300 dense but more often dazzling pages, marveling all the while at the scope and audacity of the author’s undertaking, I found this refusal to draw conclusions disappointing.
