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Women & Horses by Mary D. Midkiff - horseback riding fitness techniques for women

Women & Horses, knowledge for the female equestrian; female equestrian fitness training and riding tips

Free Rein Author Meditates on the Woman-Horse Bond

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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