On Bullfighting | 
 enlarge | Author: A.l. Kennedy
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $11.00
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $10.99 (100%)
New (29) Used (59) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 747864
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0385720815
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.82
EAN: 9780385720816
ASIN: 0385720815
Publication Date: March 20, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Book is in excellent condition. Pages are clean and the binding is tight. Buy with confidence. We ship daily and guarantee satisfaction.
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
An Anchor Books Original
One day, on the brink of despair and contemplating her own mortality, novelist A. L. Kennedy is offered an assignment she can’t refuse–an opportunity to travel to Spain and cover a sport that represents the ultimate confrontation with death: bullfighting.
The result is this remarkable book, which takes Kennedy and her readers from the living room of her Glasgow flat to the plazas del toros of Spain and inside the mesmerizing, mystifying, brutal, and beautiful world of the bullfight. Here the sport is death: matadors (literally "killers") are men and, increasingly, women who, not unlike the Roman gladiators before them, provide a spectacle to the crowd, a dance in which their own death is as present as that of the bull. Wonderfully relaying the elements of the sport, from the breeding of the bulls and the training of the matadors to the intricate choreography of the bullfight and its strange connection to the Inquisition, Kennedy meditates on a culture that we may not countenance or fully understand but which is made riveting by the precision of her prose and the passion and humor of her narrative.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 A very informative and interesting read May 19, 2006
I was in the process of researching bullfighting when I came across this book. I read it from cover to cover. This is an amazing and intimate account of a woman from outside of the Spanish bullfighting world coming to terms with its mystique, barbarism, and ceremony in highly readable and compelling terms.
Her journey through Spain, and especially her trip by rail to Granada and the home of Lorca, was insightful and haunting in its detail of a society's need to cling to its traditions. The history of the bullfight and the author's personal story of physical and mental anguish were well matched, and the experience of this book has stayed with me long after finishing its pages.
 Real insights on bullfighting November 16, 2004
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There is very little taurine literature worth reading, specially in English. There is the dysfunctional American hotdog of the Hemingway type, busting with alcoholised mysticism, or else the false aficionado of the Barnaby Conrad sort, trading in stale myth-making and half-digested pseudosociology. Books of this kind proliferated in the 50s.
A L Kennedy writes instead an extended essay, full of real insights, in which she relates bullfighting to mankind's [sometimes unconscious, often not] preocupation with death. She does this without grandiosity or bombastic sententiousness, or even that tiresome female one-upmanship. The fact that she is very obviously an Anglo-saxon woman may grate on some readers; then again, the freshness of her point of view would not be the same if she were a classically-educated, conservative Spaniard speaking of a long-cherished, unquestioned value. It is this freshness that makes her contribution interesting.
The volume is perhaps poorly edited, but make no mistake: it is one of the few books on bullfighting worth reading. A minor classic.
 Overwrought (but informative) August 15, 2003
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book is written in language that some might mistake for fluid, inventive prose - but it's labored and overwrought. It doesn't help that the subject matter continually returns to the author's health and ill-spirit, or that every problem in her life can be conveniently and neatly tied to bullfighting. A typical passage will open with her problems, then segue with something like "...but I won't think about my aching back, instead I'll distract myself with the story of xyz bullfighter who I just saw some film of..." and will then return to her issues with life. The suicide thing is, frankly, a cliche. Ending with the positive - she does a good job of delineating the history and the terminology as it would naturally become accessible to the first-timer.
A Writer's Corrida November 19, 2002
A.L.Kennedy's extraordinary book leads us from her own near-suicide in Scotland to the gaiety of the Fiesta Brava in Spain. Her work is here somewhat shaped by her own ill-health, and much of the book is a meditation on death. Do not be put off by this idea, for the whole thing is exquisitely written and makes use of unusually moving images: the result is positivley inspirational. Kennedy has studied toreo in great detail, and has a good grasp of her subject; she neither condones nor condemns. My only criticism is that the book runs out of steam towards the end when the author relies less on her stunning abstract and philosophical ideas, and gives a semi-journalistic account of the corrida. There has been a lot of very bad literature about bullfighting (including some by Hemingway!) but Ms. Kennedy's book is of the highest quality, well researched and written, and deserves a very wide audience.
A worthy addition bullfighting lore April 14, 2002
The author does not pretend to be an expert on bullfighting. She undertook this book because it was offered to her. The result is not so much an explication of the sport but a meditation on it. She considers, among other things, why do matadors risk death when most professional sportsmen risk only defeat? The author roughly compares her own encounter with suicide with the risk that professional bullfighters take in the ring.
This is an informed meditation on bullfighting. The author has done her homework. For a good introduction to the art, I would recommend Death in the Afternoon by Hemingway. It as an informed, literary intoduction to bullfighting with diversions into war, death and art. But this book is a good supplement. Unlike Hemingway, A.L. Kennedy describes the course of actual bullfights she has seen. Her meditations are engaging. On Bullfighting doesn't take long to read, but the curious would-be afficionado will value it.
|
|
|
