Reviews: (by author)

Budiansky, Stephen. The World According to Horses: How they Run, See, and Think. New York: Holt, 2000. ISBN 0-8050-6054-5. $16.95

Budiansky is a professional science writer with many books for adults to his credit, including The Nature of Horses. As he writes in his introduction, The World According to Horses is a young reader's version of his adult book. Writing clearly and vigorously, he explains difficult concepts extremely well, cutting back not on information for his young audience, but expressing technical information in lively prose replete with both hardcore science and fascinating real stories. He begins at the time humans and horses linked up, in the plains of the Ukraine and explains the profound effects horses had on, for example, warfare and the spread of proto Indo European. In this chapter as in all the others, he presents the facts and information well, then includes a fascinating section titled "How Do We Know?" in which he details the science involved in the most current understanding of horses. Other chapters discuss how horses see the world, while also explaining a great deal about evolution and different kinds of eyes; about how horses behave and why; about how horses communicate; and about the morphology of horses, how evolution shaped them into very efficient running animals.

Budiasky's book is a very interesting, scientifically-based, and well written book, of interest to lovers of horses, of course, but also to those who enjoy non-fiction in general.

Highly recommended.

A. Allison

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