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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
as good as English-language taurine writing gets,
By
This review is from: On Bullfighting (Paperback)
On Bullfighting is the product of a commission Ms. Kennedy received while deeply mired in depression and plagued by writer's block. One can be grateful for the stroke of editorial genius that suggested to someone that Kennedy, with no taurine background whatsoever, might be profitably set to this particular task. In lesser hands that would be a recipe for disaster (or at least near-mediocrity - witness the shallow, 1998, celebrity-struck, efforts of Eamonn O'Neill in Matadors: A journey into the heart of modern bullfighting, barely more satisfying than a People magazine feature story). What emerged from Kennedy's brief research (brief, one might surmise from the short, seven-title bibliography - Belmonte, Conrad, Fulton, Hemingway (2), McCormick, and Sánchez /Durán), her viewing of historic corridas on film, and her attendance at a half dozen bullfights during the 1998 and 1999 Iberian temporadas, is a minor miracle - a work of value for the initiated and uninitiated alike. Kennedy gives us enough history to reveal some of the threads that tie the present day phenomenon to its historic antecedents, and tentatively explores some links that more timid, inside observers have overlooked - like the similarities between the bullfight's rituals and the auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition. She bravely wades into an examination of the nature and sources of duende (the taurine world's counterpart to Justice Stewart's "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it"), and she touches on the critical issues plaguing the present day corrida - weakened taurine bloodlines, horn shaving and other pre-corrida attacks on the central creatures' integrity, the celebritization of the festival, the organized vogue of anti-taurine animus. She gives us a meditation on death and the courage to face it, as honestly drawn when describing the events on the sand, as when describing her own personal demons - and a meditation on the generic nature of "vocation," its manifestations in the mundo taurino and in the literary world. On Bullfighting was not meant to be an aficionado's handbook, detailing the differences in the myriad of cape passes, the differences in traje embroidery styles, the historic roots of every modern taurine manifestation inherited from the bullfight's speculative historical antecedents. It is a brief, impressionistic look at a complex cultural phenomenon seen through the eyes of a brutally honest observer, and described with the well-wielded tools of a major literary craftsman. In this, it shares a literary place similar to that held in the mundo cuadrilátero by Joyce Carol Oates' similarly titled, similarly insightful work, On Boxing. All this is woven into a concise, sensitive narrative that chronicles one woman's self-guided, absolutely non-tendentious exploration of the mundo taurino - a valuable grounding for anyone new to the bullfights, and a valuable articulation for the aficionado of some of that hard-to- put-your-finger-on-it stuff that makes bullfighting more than the sum of its beautiful and horrific parts.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Real insights on bullfighting,
By Charlus (NYC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Bullfighting (Paperback)
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A modern look at an ancient spectacle,
By Evanne D. Miller (Kansas City, MO United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: On Bullfighting (Paperback)
This book offers a refreshingly new slant on a subject that has been discussed at length by those who love and those who abhore the corrida de toros. At a time when animal rights enthusiasts would have us blush with shame over the systematic torture of an innocent animal, it takes courage and honest objectivity to bypass the emotional rhetoric in an effort to understand the history and the implications inherent in this unique dance of death. What can a contemporary Scottish woman in considerable physical and psychic pain tell us about this peculiarly Spanish drama? Surprisingly much. Kennedy covers a lot of ground very concisely and touches on artistic, moral, and philosophical implications that reverberate far beyond the immediate subject matter. Whether you have strong feelings for or against the ritual killing of bulls, you will find much that is thoughtprovoking in this cleardiscussion of the beauty and horror of bullfighting.
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