Book description
'When you touch a Lipizzaner,' Frank Westerman was told as a child,
'you are touching history.'
In Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse he explores the history of
these unique creatures, an extraordinary troop of pedigree horses
first bred as personal mounts for the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.
Following the bloodlines of the studbook, he reconstructs the story of
four generations of imperial steeds as they survive the fall of the
Habsburg Empire, two world wars and the insane breeding experiments
conducted under Hitler, Stalin and Ceausescu.
But what begins as a fairytale becomes a chronicle of the quest for
racial purity. Carrying the reader across Europe, from imperial
stables and stud farms to the controversial gene labs of today,
Westerman asks, if animal breeders are so good at genetic engineering,
why do attempts to perfect the human strain always end in tragedy?
Brother Mendel's Perfect Horse, a unique and engrossing
fusion of history and travel writing, is a modern fable in which the
pure-blood horse ends up revealing man's own shortcomings.
Frank Westerman was born in 1964 and lived and worked in Moscow from
1997 to 2002 as correspondent for the leading Dutch
NRC Handelsblad
newspaper. Westerman is the author of five highly praised books. His
work has been published in more than ten languages and has won many
prizes.
