THE LEGEND OF ZIPPY CHIPPY: LIFE LESSONS FROM HORSE RACING’S MOST LOVABLE LOSER
By William Thomas
McClelland & Stewart
www.williamthomas.ca
Secretariat. Man o’ War. Seabiscuit. War Admiral.
For some, the names of America’s most celebrated racehorses have as much resonance as those of famous two-legged athletes like Babe Ruth, Johnny Unitas, Bill Russell and Muhammad Ali.
Then there was Zippy Chippy, the “loveable loser” — a horse of great pedigree (Man o’ War and War Admiral were both part of his bloodline) who became famous in the 1990s and early 2000s for failing to win even once in 100 races, including a number at the Three-County Fair in Northampton.
In “The Legend of Zippy Chippy,” Canadian author and humorist William Thomas recounts Zippy’s less-than-stellar record and the efforts of his faithful trainer, Felix Monserrate, to wring a win from the horse.
But it’s also a story of how Zippy’s spirit and perseverance made him both a fan favorite and an antidote to the kind of thinking embodied in the expression, often attributed to football coach Vince Lombardi, that “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
Thomas traces Zippy’s beginnings in upstate New York in 1991 (“Not much is known about the early days of [his] career, because apparently no one wants to take the blame for it”) to his first races in Belmont Park and Aqueduct Racetrack in New York City, and then to his final ones, at the Three-County Fair from 1999 to 2004. Along the way, Zippy had a few second-place finishes, but more often he was further behind.
He hung up his hooves, so to speak, after an 8th-place finish at Three-County Sept. 10, 2004, after which, Thomas writes, the horse “didn’t move. His big, brown eyes turned glassy and he blinked. His head dropped a little and he drifted off to sleep.”
It was a well-earned rest, Thomas adds: “Hail the horse that used his less-than-illustrious career to fight against overachieving, winning at all costs, and, of course, unnecessary perspiration.”
LAND OF LOVE AND RUINS
By Oddný Eir
Translated by Philip Roughton
Restless Books
www.restlessbooks.com
Icelandic author Oddný Eir won accolades a few years ago for her novel “Land of Love and Ruins,” including a European Union Prize for Literature and the Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize. Now the novel is available in English by way of Restless Books, a Brooklyn-Amherst publisher headed by Ilan Stavans, the writer and professor of Latino Studies at Amherst College.
“Land of Love and Ruin” takes the form of a diary by an unnamed female narrator, a writer who finds the ground shifting beneath her feet in different ways following Iceland’s financial crisis of 2008-11. Recently separated, and feeling uncertain about a potential new relationship, the narrator uses her diary to examine ties to family, country and even the earth.
On a drive through a rural area, she notes “a plague” of vacation cottages scattered across the landscape: “Entire farms bought and turned into summer-cottage developments … people from town view the land beneath summer cottages as plots, not the earth. A unified vision of the land has been lost.”
Her search for new understanding and meaning in her relationships brings her all over Iceland and to France, Switzerland and the Lake District of northern England, home to the Romantic poets and siblings Dorothy and William Wordsworth. The diary becomes a big canvas that looks at life’s small details as well as at big questions about philosophy, history, archeology, ecology and other fields.
As the publisher writes, it’s a book of “linguistic verve” that’s all about finding “a place to belong and a way of being in the world.”