Farewell to the Horse: A Cultural History

For 6,000 years, the human alliance with the horse has been unparalleled—more stable even than our relationship with our gods, argues Raulff—but for two centuries we have been gradually withdrawing from this "Centaurian Pact" (as one-sidedly as we began it). This isn't one of the recent "hidden lives" books that reveal the secret intelligence of a familiar species—it is very much a human-centric history, of how we used horses and how central they became to our imagination and our lives. It's an eclectic and almost impossibly wide-ranging tour of those two centuries, with a taste for theoretical pronouncements but most fascinating in its anecdotal details, looking at a particular painting or reminding us through vivid detail how the horse was not just a creature of the open plains but one of the great engines of the modern city.