Black Beauty
January 17th, 2010 Posted in Life Style
Product DescriptionAs a young horse, Black Beauty is well-loved and happy. But when his owner is forced to sell him, his life changes drastically. He has many new owners–some of them cruel and some of them kind. All he needs is someone to love him again. . . Whether pulling an elegant carriage or a ramshackle cab, Black Beauty tries to live as best he can. This is his amazing story, told as only he could tell it. Amazon. com Review”A horse is a horse of course unless of cou. . . More >>
$2.49
Black Beauty
January 17th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
One of the great unanswered questions of life is the mysterious attraction that horses hold for young girls. Sure, we all know that there’s some kind of psychosexual component, but why horses in particular? At any rate, Black Beauty & the rest of those equine tales (Black Stallion, National Velvet, etc. ) were never central to my childhood reading, but my wife fondly recalls her father reading it to her–a topic I feel it is best to avoid commenting on. Anna Sewell was left crippled by a childhood accident and depended on horses to get around. A Quaker, she was apparently extremely sensitive about any violence towards animals. As the quote above indicates, she even used prompting rather than prodding to guide her own rides . In the closing years of her life, suffering intense pain herself, she wrote this book to call attention to the mistreatment of horses and it became a genuine publishing phenomenon. She uses a first person (first horse?) narrative to completely anthropomorphize Black Beauty, a well bred and even tempered stallion who passes from owner to owner. Over the course of the book, Beauty’s owners display varying standards of treatment from kindness to neglect to open brutality. But Beauty perseveres and happily ends up back with his original owners. Along the way, Sewell also gets the opportunity to take some potshots at hunting, drinking, poverty and the like. It’s easy to see how the story became a classic, thanks to its sympathetic portrayal of Beauty and his fellow horses. But it is fundamentally based on a lie. Animals aren’t human and horses aren’t even particularly intelligent by animal standards. We shouldn’t mistreat them because to do so is unnecessary and counterproductive. But to pretend that they have complex personalities and emotions does them no service and sort of cheapens the dialogue about what “rights” animals should have. The book makes for a pleasant read, provided you don’t let kids take it to seriously. GRADE: B-
Rating: 3 / 5
January 17th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
This book is just plain boring and useless. it lacks any kind of climax and its “action” scenes are still boring and serve no real purpose. Save your money for a real novell! Anyone who likes horses might partially care about the main character, but otherwise you’ll find yourself wishing he was dead so you could stop reading it! The character has no flare of personality and is your basic stupid goody-two-shoes. Any real book the characters have flaws. Of course, this book is lousy and the characters are just boring. I have consulted several others and we all agree on one point: its a total waste of money, time, and effort. This book somehow managed to become a classic, proboble just because it has to do with horses. It has no plot! There really must be better ways to spend your time than read this book! This so-called novel deserves a -999999999 rating.
Rating: 1 / 5
January 17th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
This book is just plain boring. It lacks a climax. Black Beauty is just a little goodie-two-shoes. After the first few chapters, you really don’t care about the main character anymore. I had to read it for school and even my teacher thought it was boring so we stopped in the middle of it!! I urge you to NOT buy this book!
Rating: 1 / 5
January 18th, 2010 at 12:06 am
I hated this book! It has no climax, nothing even interesting! If somebody can tell me why this book is considered a classic I would love to know! The only thing it has that good novels have is pages! If there was a zero rating I would have given this book a 0. In fact, I would have given it negative numbers!
Rating: 1 / 5
January 18th, 2010 at 1:33 am
Literary Analysis of Black Beauty by: Anna Sewell In this classic story about a beautiful thoroughbred horse Black Beauty goes through good and bad times, good and bad masters. {Sewell uses many sentences about the story , to make it more interesting. She also uses literary devices to understand exactly what the story was about. } The story was a major part in this story.
Rating: 3 / 5