HOT CORNER

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What: “$tud”

Author: Kevin Conley

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Cost: $24.95

Seattle Slew, who died Tuesday, 25 years to the day after his victory in the Kentucky Derby, made a fortune in breeding, drawing fees of well more than $100,000 a mare.

But that’s a pittance compared to $500,000 a session drawn by Storm Cat.

This book, which came out last month, takes a somewhat humorous but mostly informative look at the business of breeding race horses.

Kevin Conley, an editor for the New Yorker, decided there had been enough written about the sex lives of humans. So he chose to write about the sex life of horses.

Although Seattle Slew is among the sires profiled in the book, it opens with a visit to Overbrook Farm in Lexington, Ky., the home of Storm Cat.

Conley writes: “If the Kentucky Derby is the most exciting two minutes in sports, then Storm Cat is the most expensive 30 seconds.”

Storm Cat’s stud fee is nearly double that of his closest rival. It’s that high because his offspring has earned more than $21 million at the track, almost $7 million more than anyone else’s.

Usually, when a champion thoroughbred “retires to stud,” those words are the last racing enthusiasts read about the horse. “$tud” pulls back the curtain on a different aspect of the horse racing world, and takes a voyeuristic look at the intimate acts and the billion-dollar business behind them.

Only slightly less intense than the action in the breeding shed are the showdowns at the Keeneland auctions. Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the crown prince of Dubai who is profiled in another recent horse racing book, “From the Desert to the Derby,” is among the unique characters included in this book.