Book Review by Steven D. Price

Racing Time: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, Patrick Smithwick, Dementi Milestone Publishing, Manakin-Sabot, VA, 2019, cloth, illustrations by Sam Robinson, 481 pagesIn 2006 Patrick Smithwick published Racing My Father, a memoir of his legendary steeplechaser forebear, A.P. "Paddy" Smithwick. Six years later came Flying Change, the account of the author's youth as a race rider under his father's tutelage before leaving the track for a writing and teaching career until the sport's siren song drew him back.

Now comes Racing Time. Subtitled A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Liberation, it is at once a celebration of the author's appreciation of family and friends, both human and equine, and an elegiac recollection of three men with whom Smithwick's life was as closely entwined as the braids on a hunting whip lash: the late former-jockeys-turned trainers Tom Voss and Dickie Small (names familiar to all race enthusiasts) and groom Speedy Kiniel.