The Dangerous Summer [Paperback]

Ernest Hemingway (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company (June 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0685099911
• ISBN-13: 978-0685099919
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,285,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bullfighting through the eyes of Hemingway, February 23, 2000

By 

Linda Linguvic (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dangerous Summer (Paperback)

Considered literary non-fiction, this is the account of the 1959
season of bullfighting in Spain and the intense competition between
two competing matadors for the glory of that season. It is his last
major work at age 60; he killed himself the following year.

In an
introduction by James Mitchner, it is explained that this piece was
commissioned by Life Magazine. The assignment was for Hemmingway to
revisit the bullfights he had written about in his classic novel
"Death in the Afternoon" published in 1940. Hemingway was
supposed to write 10,000 words for the article. Instead, he submitted
120,000 words. It was edited down to 70,000 words and ran in three
installments.

This book I read, however, was only about 45,000 words
and focuses specifically on the particular contests between two
competing matadors who happened to be brothers in law. Hemingway had
a personal relationship with both of them and brings the reader to the
dinners and the parties as well as to the infirmary after a goring,
the painful healing process in Spanish hospitals that do not
administer painkillers, the long rides on bad roads between bullfights
and the dirt and heat and fatigue and glory.

I have not read much of
Hemingway and knew nothing at all about bullfighting when I started
reading. Yet, by the end of the book a portrait of the author emerges
as well as an understanding of the history, tradition choreographed
performance of skill that occurs in the bull ring. Somehow, I was
able to move beyond my personal feelings about the slaughter of the
bull, and get into the mindset of Hemingway and the people of Spain,
where bullfighting is a national passion.

It has to do with courage.
And it has to do with facing death.

Hemmingway said it all it better
than I ever could:

"This was Antonio's regular appointment with
death that we had to face every day. Any man can face death but to be
committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain
classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal
it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which
you love is more complicated than facing death."

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't ever go to a bullfight without reading this book first, October 23, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Dangerous Summer (Paperback)

I should have read this chronicle of bullfighting before my college semester spent in Madrid. I did not read it and instead, I sat in the bleachers of the arena completely disgusted, wishing for the first time in my life that I was at an American football game instead. I was so ignorant that I almost felt tempted to run down and let the pathetic black creature loose, like some rebel animal rights person in a research lab. Back then, I did not understand the history, tradition, glory and sentimentality that belongs to bullfighting. I was ignorant and should not have gone to the bullfight without reading this chronicle by Hemingway first. Now, I some day plan to return and to watch another bullfight. I know now I will see a completely different sport; and not really a sport but a performance. I once thought bullfighting was a battle between man and beast. After reading The Dangerous Summer I know it is a choreographed performance of skill, wisdom, experience and bravery. I urge anyone who plans to go to a bullfight, to read this first. Do not judge this Spanish tradition until you first understand what it is about.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dangerous to the Bitter End., February 10, 2007

By 

Billyjack D'Urberville (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Dangerous Summer (Paperback)

Have you ever pulled a big, bitter pickle fron a barrel and enjoyed it? Munched fresh garlic gloves and savored them despite the pain? Downed Bloody Marys with 3 times the ordinary dose of pepper, and with tabasco sauce thrown in? If you said yes to all 3, chances are you will greatly enjoy this book.

By the end of his life, it is now clear, Hemingway had developed a loose, jocund, even cheery reportorial writing style as a sort of second mode. He first really loosened up his sentences and paragraphs in this manner in the major novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, then went back to tautness (modified) in Across the River, Old Man and the Sea (straight old stuff), and The Moveable Feast (new high marks in the original style). But this, like the recently published Under Kilamanjaro, is a development of the second mode. Way too many scholarly bios and criticism, early after EH's death and to date, have just called the later writing a slackening and a self-charicature, as if the most careful writer of modern English took a 15 year vacation. A lot of this kind of talk was and remains resentment, of course, against the stature of the writing and the man's public clowning. But to come to this close to final product with such misconceptions is a big mistake.

EH once personified Nostalgia as a beautiful woman, and if the opener here doesn't move you -- EH returning to his beloved Spain after years away -- you ought to check your birth record and be sure you were born on this good earth. After the drive in, EH seemingly opens up the second relaxed mode big time, fun and adventures on the road chasing down a mano a mano between the 2 biggest bullfight rivals of the day. There are gags and funny business and personal trivia, even, that the earlier writer avoided, for sure, but boy, don't get suckered into those traps. The old man with the pen is menacing as ever, and in a whole new way. Just when you're set up like a bowling pin he takes you with a sucker punch -- an absolutely deadpan observation about Dominquin's statue of himself in his own house, the way a spooky wind rises at dusk in a vagrant bullring, spelling menace. The jolts are as real, however different, from what hits you in In Our Time. And they have a heavy gravity and patina of sadness that only an old fellow can deliver. Indeed, the effects can be quite emotionally draining in their potent truth.

The estate kept putting out these edited versions, buying the scholars' line, poor Miss Mary not wanting to impair "the reputation." Well, ladies and gentlemen, its intact. Dear Scribners or whoever you are now, please publish the whole ball of wax or let Kent State do it, the long manuscript that EH told his friends was after "Proustian effects." This book, a calculated risk to "the reputation," pays off quite well and stands up easily to repeated reading. EH's inborn talents were in the acuity of his eye and his ear (he had to learn writing the hard way) and if the finale found him struggling with sentences once more, the eye and the ear had only magnificently and spookily ripened.