By Julie Preble, Assistant Editor
I?ve got four large, photo-centric books on my desk, just waiting to be reviewed. Each of these books would be a perfect addition to your coffee-table collection. I’ll share one each week for the next four weeks.
Every book is unique in story/photography and will appeal to different types of horse people.
No. 1?The Long Ride, by Lucian Spataro Jr., Ph. D.
This book details the incredible journey Dr. Spataro took with his three horses in 1989. They started at Huntington Beach, California, and rode all the way to Chesapeake Beach, Maryland.
The trek took him five months to complete. His purpose was to bring awareness to the major environmental issue of disappearing rainforests.
You might like it if…
You enjoy a variety of imagery, from riding photos to landscape shots from across the country. The book also reads like a novel and will appeal to anyone who?s inspired by distance-riding feats.
Excerpt from the inside flap
The Long Ride is a vivid, sweeping and passionate story about a modern day adventure that puts you firmly in the saddle, on the back of a beautiful Arabian horse, and sets you upon a record-setting ride through small towns and big cities across America.
It is the story of a team with a very specific purpose?a team of people and their Arabian horses on a coast-to-coast journey to set a record and draw attention to the destruction of the world?s rainforests. In this second book about his horseback ride, Spataro demonstrates the wit, eloquence and insight that inspired a legion of people to become involved in the ride and interested in the pressing rainforest issue.
With hundreds of photos from Spataro?s collection and historic sources, The Long Ride is a beautiful chronology of a place in time when three horses and a team of people were doing the ?right thing? against very long odds; their perseverance is even more inspiring today, twenty years later. The author writes perceptively about this experience and a wide range of subjects; the environment, the culture, and the character of the areas he rode through, as well as the people he met along the way. The elusive and mysterious dimensions of time and distance, the vast and colorful landscape and the people from coast to coast are distinctively portrayed. His flair for fresh points of view, colorful anecdotes and vivid examples, paired with simple and easily understood explanations of how nature works and why we are where we are today has made this a very readable work?
?The Long Ride will both inform you and appeal to your sense of adventure; it is the next best thing to making the ride yourself. But more importantly, it will inspire you to act and lead in your own way, at your own pace, but in unison, and now!
Find it
http://www.thelongride.com/raa-buy-book.php
