A pleasure for practitioners, and a rewarding entertainment for the armchair swashbucklers and varlet-tamers among us.
A literate, learned, and, beg pardon, razor-sharp history of fencing and kindred martial arts, by an English Olympian and saber master.
“Of all sports arguably the most romantic,” Cohen writes of fencing, “it also most closely simulates the act of armed manslaughter.” Homicidal though its origins may be, fencing has long had a certain aristocratic allure, and Cohen’s pages are peppered with appearances by the likes of Richard Francis Burton, the Orientalist and adventurer who found time between seeking the sources of the Nile and translating the Kama Sutra to carve up a rack of skilled opponents in the ring; the Roman emperor Commodus, whose announcement that he planned to suit up as a gladiator and try his hand at fencing earned him assassination at the hands of real swordsmen; and the noble Italian foilman Nedo Nadi, who resisted Mussolini’s overtures to join the Fascist cause while guiding Italy’s Olympic team to fencing glory. This is a work of anecdote and accumulated trivia rather than of sustained narrative, but wondrous anecdote it is, whether Cohen is addressing the roster of actors and actresses who have wielded steel throughout Hollywood history—Charlton Heston, Lana Turner, Peter Ustinov, Peter O’Toole, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and “even Robert De Niro” among them—or considering the developments of the armed martial arts in China and Japan. Fencing, he insists, is by no means of antiquarian interest; even today, “the upper reaches of certain leading German companies are still said to require a dueling background,” while some of the sport’s brightest stars are emerging from minority communities in large American cities. Not all is noble in his pages, happily enough; Cohen details enough incidents of cheating to warm a French judge’s heart, enough scandals to sustain a run of tabloids, and enough oddities (such as the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich’s insistence that American Jews judge his performance at the 1936 Olympics) to fuel dozens of spinoff articles.
A pleasure for practitioners, and a rewarding entertainment for the armchair swashbucklers and varlet-tamers among us.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50417-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.
An exhaustive—and exhausting—chronicle of the champ's boxing career and disastrous life.
Tyson was dealt an unforgiving hand as a child, raised in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in a "horrific, tough and gruesome" environment populated by "loud, aggressive" people who "smelled like raw sewage.” A first-grade dropout with several break-ins under his belt by age 7, his formal education resumed when he was placed in juvenile detention at age 11, but the lesson he learned at home was to do absolutely anything to survive. Two years later, his career path was set when he met legendary boxing trainer Cus D'Amato. However, Tyson’s temperament never changed; if anything, it hardened when he took on the persona of Iron Mike, a merciless and savage fighter who became undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. By his own admission, he was an "arrogant sociopath" in and out of the ring, and he never reconciled his thuggish childhood with his adult self—nor did he try. He still partied with pimps, drug addicts and hustlers, and he was determined to feed all of his vices and fuel several drug addictions at the cost of his freedom (he recounts his well-documented incarcerations), sanity and children. Yet throughout this time, he remained a voracious reader, and he compares himself to Clovis and Charlemagne and references Camus, Sartre, Mao Zedong and Nietzsche's "Overman" in casual conversation. Tyson is a slumdog philosopher whose insatiable appetites have ruined his life many times over. He remains self-loathing and pitiable, and his tone throughout the book is sardonic, exasperated and indignant, his language consistently crude. The book, co-authored by Sloman (co-author: Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss, 2012, etc.), reads like his journal; he updated it after reading the galleys and added "A Postscript to the Epilogue" as well.
At this rate, Tyson may write a multivolume memoir as he continues to struggle and survive.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16128-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
