The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle

I never expected to enjoy a book about a horse race so much.

In 1823, a southern horse (whose shall remain nameless, as the selection of this horse is the heart and soul of the book) and a northern horse, Eclipse, squared off in the first mass sporting event in American history. Running the "heroic distance" (4 mile heats), the race to be the fastest horse was merely a stand-in in the decades-long superiority contest between North and South that would culminate in the Civil War four decades later.

What is remarkable about this book is the quality of the storytelling. John Eisenberg has taken a single event that happened nearly 200 years ago and imbued it with a level of suspense and outsize importance such that the reader feels the outcome truly matters, even if the reader can't quite decide who should win. The characters - two- and four-legged alike - are richly drawn, the conflicts (and there are so many beyond the actual race itself) given life and legs, and the outcome smoothly drawn out to the closing pages.

My only complaint with this book, and it is a relatively minor one, was the frequency with which the main characters are referred to by their nicknames (i.e., William Ransom Johnson is almost always Napoleon and William Wynne is invariably Racing Billy).

The Great Match Race: When North Met South in America's First Sports Spectacle is an improbably wonderful read, certainly for anyone who loves horses, sporting events, American history, or any combination of the three. Four stars.