In the pre-Civil War era, horseracing occupied roughly the same status in America that football holds today. Champion horses won national acclaim, none more so than Lexington, the bay colt who in 1855 ran a four-mile race in seven minutes and nineteen seconds, breaking a record that had stood for one hundred years. Kim Wickens impressively re-creates nineteenth-century New Orleans, where criminals— emboldened by the breakdown in authority due to the Civil War— came dangerously close to stealing Lexington. Impeccably researched, Wickens's book is a compulsively readable work of narrative history that will appeal to sports fans, animal lovers, and history buffs alike. (BH)