Letters from Country Life

2024 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award Winner

Josh Pons, a third-generation horseman and owner of Country Life Farm, depicts a century of life inside the horse business, written from inside the fences of Maryland's oldest Thoroughbred farm.

In 2016, in the basement of his farmhouse, Josh Pons discovered thousands of letters from his grandfather's life in the Thoroughbred horse business. The son of a French cook who came to New York City in 1894, Adolphe Pons got his start working in the Fifth Avenue mansion of Gilded Age banker August Belmont II. Adolphe became his personal secretary, and later played a major role in Belmont's breeding and sale of the most famous horse in history: Man o' War. During the Great Depression, Adolphe left New York and bought a hundred-acre horse farm in Maryland, naming it Country Life after the station stop on the Long Island Railroad nearest his Garden City home.

In serial form, Josh Pons expands on the column he wrote for the leading horse publication The BloodHorse, inviting readers to once more step into the attic garret alongside him as he recovers long-lost voices speaking out of letters, telegrams, and photos. Upon the attic stage appear Gilded Age tycoons from whom the author's grandfather bought and sold horses against the backdrop of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. As Josh draws from the farmhouse's rich archive, he chronicles his grandfather's life and times and shares his own candid reflections. The result is a fascinating and fresh look at the Golden Age of Horse Racing and how the past influences our present.