Review
of "She flies Without Wings:
How Horses Touch a Woman's Soul" by Mary D. Midkiff
Reprinted
from The Daily Camera, May 6, 2001
By
Clay Evans Camera Books Editor
She Flies
Without Wings: How Horses Touch a Woman's Soul by Mary D.
Midkiff. Delacorte Press, $23.95. 276 pp.
An astonishing
number of girls growing up in the United States go through what
the wags who created "The Preppy Handbook" once called
"the horse phase" - a time, often just prior to a
burgeoning interest in boys, during which some girls seem on
the verge of becoming horses themselves, so obsessed are they.
In Boulder
writer (and rider) Mary D. Midkiff's eclectic new meditation
on the powerful bonds that can form between women and horses,
"She Flies Without Wings," it's clear that the "horse
phase" can be as long as life itself for many women.
This is
truly an unusual book. Structured to reflect the stages of a
woman's life, from young girlhood to menopause, it is part memoir
and part meditation, part poetry and part prose selections from
great writings about horses.
As Midkiff
elegantly points out, horses are both substantial and tangible
- they are big, powerful animals - and ethereal, representative
of myth and magic for millennia.
"On
an earth where most of us are shorter, smaller and less muscular
than most members of the opposite sex - where 'manpower' is
the standard measure of human force, not 'womanpower' - horses
are the great equalizer," she writes.
"She
Flies Without Wings" is a thoughtful exploration of the
relationship between equalizer and equalized that should appeal
to women and girls who love horses, as well as those who dream
of them.
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