
A progressive course in basic dressage riding, with 175 step–by–step color photos.
Customer Review: Re-publication of Articles from Practical Horseman Magazine
I'm sure I overlooked the disclaimer, but it appears this book is a compilation of the series of "Practical Horseman" magazine articles that Ms. Gray authored several years back. Still good information, of course, but I wouldn't have purchased that book had I known that. (I saved the magazine articles to a binder, you see.)
Customer Review: Should be a 4.50, but there's no intermediate step on the stars
Let me start by saying, I really think this is a good book to have in one's library. Why? In succinct, but not short or even overly brief statements, Lendon Gray provides chunks of information that neither overwhelm nor talk down to the reader. Having ridden twice in the Olympics, she knows obviously a lot more about dressage than most of us. What makes this book a pleasure is the presentation. She does it on a straight-forward approach as if talking to someone who is on the same level as her. There is a sense of equality between writer and reader's level of knowledge. In other words, she does not come across as a "I know it all and you know nothing." All the information throughout the 25 lessons are chunked into small pieces, each comes with a succinct heading that gives the reader a clue as to what she will talk about in the next third or so column. What made this book very useful to me are the images of "right / correctly" and "wrong / incorrectly" applied principles. She details what can be done to correct wrong workings in very good depth, which makes this very useful for either between lessons or for those who do not have the opportunity of working with a dressage trainer on a regular basis. I can recommend this book for most levels of riding, but believe that as with many books, it will be most useful to those who work in Training through lower Level 2 stages. Advanced Level 2 through Grand Prix riders will be far to knowledgeable to get a great deal of use out of this. But for the majority of riders, I think this book is great and it delivers what it set out to do: teach from start of riding to the first competition. It also provides a great place to go back and figure out "what went wrong" to help correct problems that creep up in riding.
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