I'm not even finished with this book yet, but I got online to see what kind of response it has received. I'm staggered to see it is not ranked higher and had only a few reviews.

This is one of those books where every page brings insights so painful, or so beautiful, I shake my head in amazement. I'm reading it slowly, lovingly, and I'll tell all my friends about it.

I'm a writer, and have written a novel about horse racing. I've explored this same territory. I almost wish I'd written this book. It is filled with truth and sadness and many, many fine portraits of the people that hang around on the backside of the track.

This guy is a very honest type of writer who sets aside his ego to get at the truth.

The book tells the story of the author's attempt to make a go of professional handicapping, but he spends a lot of time on the backstretch getting to know the people and the horses.

There is the backstretch as your trainer describes it to you ("well-oiled machine operating at peak efficiency"), and the backstretch as Barich paints it (loosely collected ragtag assortment of people and horses trying to stay afloat). Even though luck is hard to come by for many of the characters in the book, they have an earnest dignity as Bill Barich depicts them, and love and respect for the animals is predominant.

If you like racing you will like this book; if you don't like racing or are indifferent to it, you will probably like the book anyway.

This unusual and beautifully written work gets right to the heart of its topics. OK, I happen to love racing and fine horses, appreciate Florentine art and culture, and enjoy fly fishing, but I believe "Laughing in the Hills" would appeal to all who enjoy good writing. I have read this book a few times since first discovering it, and have shared it with friends as well.

A.J. Leibling captures the smokey ambience of the ring and its world with a masterly hand. Joyce Carol Oates ("On Boxing") may be squeamish and over-dramatic, and Budd Schulberg self-promoting and exasperating, but Mr. Leibling the has a touch born of a top flight journalist and ardent boxing fan who also has the benefit of minute observation, a genial sense of humor, a well seasoned knowledge of the world, and a strong classical education. We enter the world protrayed in A Neutral Corner by way of the dingy confines of Stillman's gym in New York City, but on the way over are entertained by a short, amusing and thoroughly knowledgable meditation on the Great Ancients of boxing: 18th/19th century Pierce Egan (whom Liebling calls the ring's "Thucydides") and Jewish greats Dan Mendoza and Dutch Sam. Liebling muses on their significant contribution to the ring and that of the Jewish fighters in general and we finally fetch up at Stillman's gym (an icon of New York Boxing) simultaneously with the reflection that there are few Jewish fighters these (1952) days. "With a good Jew fighter now" One of the managers declares, "you could make a fortune of money." There is the rise of Irish fighters and the economic circumstances that gave birth to both Jewish and Irish fighters, and the availability of day jobs that waylay their ring ambition. Yet this is hardly a dry academic treatise, for it is entertwined and amplified by the thoughts and opinions of the trainers, managers and boxers at Stillman's.

Liebling is interested in everything and everyone, and nothing escapes his pen as he immerses the reader in whichever world he is illustrating with his mixture of scholarly observation and streetwise humor. At one point we arrive in Tunis, where one escapes from the oppressive heat into a museum and suddenly comes upon an ancient mosaic of a boxing match. It depicts one fighter knocking down the other. "The fellow on the receiving end", Liebling muses, "has an experienced disillusioned look, like that of a boy who has fought out of town before..." The Tunisian passion for prizefighting has deep roots, and seems hardly about to diminish, with the buildup to a local match nearly consuming the entire city.

Throughout these essays there is the sense of accompanying Liebling as he chats with the managers, watches the boxers train, pokes his head into training camps and interviews fighters and has a drink at The Neutral Corner, a New York bar and grill, to hash it all out. We sit with him near ringside where his smooth prose in no way interferes with his immediate and lively portrayal of the fights. We become acquainted with Floyd Patterson, a sensitive and intelligent fighter forever in search of his soul, the professorial Archie Moore, a very young Cassius Clay and another side of the habitually taciturn Sonny Liston.

Liebling's prose flows and some have remarked on its pyrotechnics, but is tight and descriptive, and his interests comprehensive. Each essay (originally printed in The New Yorker) builds an absorbing world of its own, though several are connected by common themes (for instance, Stillman's gym, Floyd Patterson's series of fights). This is a book for the die-hard boxing fan, for it there is little in it that does not pertain to boxing, its past and present. It can also be enjoyed by the general reader and lover of good writing, for it is a collecton of essays, each one lively and gracefully written, about the people, first and foremost, who make up the old and sometimes dark world of prizefighting.

Leibling's essays are filled with history, humanity and delightful idiosyncracies - all in a prose that recalls a bygone era. This book is not simply for fight fans, it's for anyone who loves to read.

This book is a must for all boxing fans. It contains reviews of BOTH Patterson/Johansson and Patterson/Liston fights, plus Ali's first pro bout. Mr. Liebling was the consummate boxing writer. He gives some very interesting information on the fighters camps and personal lives that make for a great read. An essential addition to any library

Bill Barich's Traveling Light is a "reader friendly" combination travelogue and travel guide providing ten chronological chapters from a year of wandering from the Pacific Northwest to Tuscany and back to California. Barich travels around the world and adds wit and wry observation to a fine armchair read.

ever since reading barrich's 'laughing in the hills' a few decades ago, i have considered barrich one of the finest articulators of the race track experience. in this latest book, with the chapter titled 'revenge at golden gate' he continues to express the essence of a horse player's experience at the track with wit and insight.

Barich lends his gorgeous prose to a flyfishing "rite of passage" theme that has been done many times before by many writers with mixed results. Nothing new here and for the technical angler there are no insights relating to techniques. Enjoy for the sheer beauty of the prose. The book has been promoted as containing illustrations by Russell Chatham. Strangely, the copy I purchased had no illustrations whatsoever! Some prospective purchasers of the book may be put off by its brevity. It's really not much more than a medium-length essay, albeit a beautiful one.

CRAZY FOR RIVERS Bill Barich Lyons Press $16.95 80 pp.

"That autumn, I went a little crazy for rivers," says Bill Barich at the beginning of this deceptively simple book. Fortunately, Barich went crazy for words many autumns ago; he can create deep pools of prose with catch phrases at the bottom which sparkle with insight when brought to the surface of our consciousness. In this paean to fishing, he takes us to rivers like the Bear, "...with a chilly wind blowing and bruised looking clouds bunched on the horizon;" Stuart Fork, where a "silvery little rainbow" leaped up, "...as hooked in the moment as I was;" or the Buffalo, which had "soul...and compensated for its shabbiness by serving up eager brook trout." Barich lures us steadily through these rivers to the autumn he went crazy, and the lessons he learns. With his evocative writing, Barich makes standing in the water and waving a stick a magic entry to a land we might like to visit, even if we don't like to fish. However, Barich casts his prose lines out for a bigger catch than just a good fish story. In his hands, the rod becomes the measure of his life; reel time is reflection time, as if the bait tossed into the water ripples through his consciousness. He discovers that an "ugly" river may deliver much better fishing than the prettiest of streams; he learns that standing longer where others have stood with less patience may produce results; and shortly after releasing a brown trout back into the North Yuba River, he has an epiphany: "It must all be catch and release in the end, I thought, all part of a flow whose essence we cannot grasp." In the short span of eighty pages, we watch Downieville(on the Downie River)change from a town full of old geezers selling gold flakes on plank sidewalks, to a trendy village where mountain bikers guzzle cappucino at a sidewalk café. We also experience the transformation of the young Barich, who "...had too much nervous energy to sit calmly on a bank," preferring "the wading and casting and stalking," into the older Barich, who "...imagined a day might come when I could sit by a stream without fishing at all, just meditating as the monks were said to do." Such peerless prose, with no pretensions, will make you crazy for Barich.

Barich can write colorfully about California, no doubt about that, but he errs in including too much minutinae and not enough about California's most important issue: water. The politics of water must be central to ANY discussion of California. Southern California would not exist as we know it today without Northern California water. The movers and shakers in the water game are crucial for any understanding of 20th century California. Barich misses the boat, so to speak.

The Kirkus review missed the point. The book was on California, technically. It tells the history of places there. But what the reviewer missed was the ride each reader gets to take with Mr. Barich as he drives from the tip of California down briefly into Mexico. On it we hear bits of Mr. Barich's past when he first moved to California, then settled down with his wife only to be upheaveled again 15 or so years later when that love ends. Those are brief mentions with the crux of the story being HIS observations on the state of things in California, meaning the state of things all over. How we haven't grown much as a culture (despite our young dreams and hopes for ourselves), how we still remain ignorant to others experiences, and how kindness is so rarely shown but desperately needed. Reading the book I didn't feel like a reader at all, but a listener along on the journey.

Bill Barich travels throughout the state, meets people, and describes California's various places. As a native Californian, it was interesting to see how he described the various people at the various places that both he and I have been. In order to be pithy, he has to distill a town into a short description, which risks greatly oversimplifying matters. Barich pulls it off amazingly well, with dead-on descriptions of many places. Readers may take issue with how he depicts a favorite place, but I think he manages to capture the feel of each place he goes. Definitely worth reading if you're from California or know someone who is.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.It included interesting facts on wine-making with believable,interesting characters and plot. I hope to read more from this author.

This book has many wonderful photos but it seems sometimes that the focus is more on human celebrities rather than their magnificent equine counterparts. There is also no information on any of the horses whatsoever except name and what race it was. Interesting book to skim through, but not something you could spend hours on, or even one hour.

Fans of racing will learn something new by looking at the images in this book. A racing fan myself, I saw great horses, jockeys, trainers, and owners in a new light. We read so much about War Admiral and Whirlaway, "Sunny Jim" and Eddie Arcaro, but images, especially good ones, are difficult to come by. This book opens up that world of racing's golden age of Triple Crown winners and celebrity owners. I think the book is an excellent companion to the Seabiscuit book. The images capture on film much of the world that Seabiscuit lived in. A worthy addition to any racing library.

Bill Barich's slim volume, The Sporting Life, was a monumental disappointment. A review in the San Diego Union compared this book to A River Runs Through It. I disagree...lustily. I'd like to toss this book into a river. A book about horse racing, boxing and fly-fishing...three of my favorite vices inside one set of covers. But each of these essays is merely warmed over gruel. The boxers are long retired, the horses don't run, and the fly fishing stories are merely tedious. You have the feeling that Barich collected a handful of articles that were so poor no one else would print them and then foisted them on us. It's a truly dreadful book. Don't buy it.

Barich writes beautiful clean prose, and there's always a sly sense of humour in his stories, but this volume is a bit of a disappointment. Only the piece on Irish Pat Lawlor really seems to have been worked up; the others have the appearance of having been dashed off quickly and a bit carelessly -- the endings, in particular, look hurried -- although the prose is always fine. Two pieces in particular make one feel let down. 'Going to the Moon', the story of a Russian baseball team, looks to be just building up steam when it ends; and 'Feather River Country' just goes nowhere at all. That said, 'The Sporting Life' is still a pleasant light read, and I'll keep my eye out for what Barich does in the future.