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
A marginally funny exposÇ of life on the European pro golf circuit. According to Donegan, a Manchester Guardian reporter who masqueraded as a pro caddy during the 1996 European PGA tour, “caddying is . . . not brain surgery. It is much more complicated than that.” From this clumsy metaphor-cum-witticism, we might surmise that Donegan wields turns of phrase about as effectively as he wielded a golf bag (and we need only read the subtitle to see how well he did that). But seriously, the author seems quite genial, and is always willing to be the butt of his own joke (perhaps this is because the Milquetoast personalities of the European PGA tour provide little fodder for the author’s japes). However, his stories about the erratic quality of tournaments on a circuit that included such golfing meccas as Dubai, Czech Republic, Morocco, and Austria, or the boozy, vagabond lifestyles of caddies and the less successful golfers, begin to sound familiar (see any of the dozens of other golf books published over the past few years). Basically, Donegan played Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Ross Drummond, a mid-table tour pro whose delusions of greatness and outsized ego often serve as grist for the author’s mill (though not as often as the occurrence of Cervantes references used by the author to describe their relationship). What ensues is Drummond enjoying tantalizing glimpses of success that he, to the author’s consternation, attributes to every factor (including the teachings of the self-help guru Anthony Robbins) other than good caddying; Drummond and Donegan parting ways; and Donegan looking to land one-shot tournament caddying assignments. Par for the course, as golf books go.
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18584-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Early (who also edited the recent Body Language: Writers on Sport, p. 168, etc.) compiles a formidable team of contributors to render honor to a man bigger than boxing, bigger than sports. Can you imagine Ecco Press, with its hard-won literary reputation, publishing a book on any other sports figure of our time than Muhammad Ali? No one but Ali has inspired such a rich tapestry of writing from names as significant as Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Ishmael Reed, Tom Wolfe, Murray Kempton, Garry Wills, Wole Soyinka, and Hunter S. Thompson, all of whom are represented in this volume. The collection is organized chronologically, beginning with perhaps the best boxing writer of them all, A.J. Liebling, who covered Ali’s first pro fight in New York, against the all-but-forgotten Sonny Banks. From there, the collection traces Ali’s singular career, from his two defeats of Sonny Liston through his affiliation with the Nation of Islam, his refusal to be drafted for combat in Vietnam and the subsequent stripping of his title, the epic battles with Joe Frazier and George Foreman, the slow winding down and his return to the spotlight at the ’96 Olympics. On the whole, the writers are so mesmerized by the sociopolitical implications of Ali that they sometimes forget to mention his fighting. Yet that seems appropriate, because Ali truly transcended sport, and much of the fascination of the book resides in watching the champ’s image evolve from poetry-spouting wiseguy to faltering elder statesman. In his brief essay, Wills observes dryly, “Modern Pindars sing the weirdest songs about Ali. They cluster around him trying to probe non-existent mysteries.” While that might be truthfully said about some of the contributions to this anthology (A. Bartlett Giamatti and Mailer offer particularly abstruse and bizarre thoughts), for the most part, this is a pleasure to read and a deserved and elegant salute to The Greatest.
Pub Date: June 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-602-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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