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1.0 out of 5 stars
Out of focus and poorly written., Oct 12 2003
If this is the "Best book on the topic...", then it must be the only one! Luckily that is not the case, as there are many really good books available on this subject.This rambling work just glosses over each subject that it attempts to address. It doesn't settle in on anything specific. The reader is never able to get a real idea of what they would be getting into when buying their first horse. The writers should have made a few assumptions at the beginning, such as this book is for the average person buying their first horse, which will be relatively inexpensive and used for basic riding. Since they did not focus on anything specific, the book has no real direction or purpose. Reading it is like looking through someone else's glasses - after a few minutes your eyes kind of go blurry and start to water. For example, there is a table that gives average costs per year of owning a horse, and under the heading "Tack" it gives annual costs from $500 - $10,000! Is this book trying to cover everyone from a 15-year old kid doing 4H to the King of Persia? Plus, don't horses eat? The table on what to expect to shell out in a year for horse costs doesn't even include the cost for feed. The total annual costs are listed as anywhere from $3520 to $25,800. Is the average Joe, about to go out to buy their first horse, really going to budget $25,000 a year for a horse? I don't think so. Who is this book written for? You start to almost get mad that you even wasted your time once you read this book. Then it gets kind of entertaining, because there are so many mistakes, that I found it hard to believe that I was reading a published work, and not a rough draft. There are sentences that start and then just end in the middle. One sentence had the word "so" when they meant to use "do". There are so many grammatical and typographical errors that it makes you wonder if the authors even read it! The last section of the book is entitled "Buyer Beware!" I think that about sums it up. I'm just glad that we got it for free at the library.
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