Sarah Maslin Nir enjoys the rides of a lifetime

The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey. Part love letter, part reportage, it niftily braids together her family history, the history of horses, and the stories of the humans on and around them. The result is a tender and at times funny book about belonging.

Nir grew up between New York City and the tip of Long Island. Her parents — struggling professionals, ‘two doctors seeking to climb a ladder of affluence’ — had bought a Park Avenue apartment for $45,000 and a beach shack in a patch of East Hampton too shabby for swank Manhattanites. Born in Poland in 1930, her psychiatrist father — a Holocaust survivor who had evaded Hitler as a boy — was ‘emphatically a foreigner’. Attuned to his Freudian methods, Nir wonders if her love of riding — ‘the sport of kings and Kennedys, a pursuit dripping with elitism and Americana’ — is a symptom of her urge to be less Jewish, more American.