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22 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Quite a load, June 5, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Sword (Hardcover)
This book contains a voluminous amount of interesting information on sword history and fencing. Unfortunately, it is also teeming rather horrendously with misconceptions, familiar myths, historical inaccuracies, and pure fiction. The author only used the barest references as his sources, some terribly outdated to the 1920's! He even omitted the major recent works of world experts and it really shows. The author is to be commended for his efforts, but his one-man show missed a tremendous amount of fundamental material on the attributes of sword types and wasted effort on frivolous entries. Throughout, the author's point of view is exclusively that of a modern instructor of sport fencing who is enthralled not with our martial heritage but with choreographed Hollywood swordplay. His inexperience with medieval fighting manuals and with medieval swords in general shows clearly. In this way it distorts much of what would be useful to today's sword enthusiasts and students of historical medieval & renaissance swordsmanship. The amount of irrelevant material included is matched only by the amount of relevant material that was left out, especially on medieval German and Italian sources, and renaissance English ones. The work excludes several major categories of European sword forms and blade types while seeming to come up with altogether new ones. The material on 19th century German swords and Mensur are full of holes and errors. Also, the entries on Japanese swords and swords arts (as well as those on Chinese) are erroneous and insulting in their simplistic. Only those who have never before encountered or studied anything substantial on the history of swords and fencing will be impressed with this book or fail to notice its serious and glaring discrepancies. It's certainly worth pursuing, but if you can afford to get the book, do so just to serve as a bad example of limited, biased research. Otherwise, serious students of the sword would be far better off to start their own library of primary! sources rather than paying $75 for this.
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16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
About as sharp as a foil....., August 27, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Sword (Hardcover)
I can't begin to say how happy I am I got this book through inter-library loan, rather than wasting my money on a very expensive paperweight. In his self-review, Evangelista discusses how he realized he had "so much information in his head," he needed to get it down. Obviously, that is where most of this information comes from -- his head. That and a collection of outdated misconceptions that have been foisted on readers by sport fencing enthusiasts for the last hundred and fifty years. Evangelista obviously is a sportfencer and has only dabbled in using real swords, rapiers, etc., in theatrical combat -- which is itself derived from sport fencing, not historical martial arts. His complete lack of reference to the litterally hundreds of existing 15th - 18th century fighting manuals, to the work of current scholars, and his 1920s-esque delusion that swordsmanship was a progressive evolution (not devolution) with the development of the smallsword, epee, and foil is almost embarrassing. These attitudes also exemplify why western martial arts are virtually extinct. Evangelista's skills as a writer are quite good, and I suppose for the absolute novice this might not be a bad work, serving as a collection of traditional secondary and tertiary sources, but my advice would be to put that money towards a variety of other works. Greg Mele, Wheaton, IL
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Everything you always AND never wanted to know about swords., October 31, 1997
This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Sword (Hardcover)
This is a great book for everybody with even a passing interrest in swords or fencing. It covers a lot of the colorfull history of swords, ranging from the ancient swords used in the Troyan war to fencing in the Olympics today. "The Encyclopedia of the Sword" is more then just an other quick reference of fencing or antique swords. When you read it you'll get an idea how fencing evolved from warfare to an art, science and sport. Evangelista describes much more as merely fact about sword-types, fencers, techniques and fencing-schools, he also manages to include a lot of anacdotes about duels and Maitres. Undoubtely inspired by Evangelista's own maitre he also includes a lot of information about the sword in fiction: literature, theatre and movies. Everybody who buys this book must however bear in mind that it wasn't written as a manual on fencing, kendo or any other form of swordsplay, nor as a elaborate book for collectors of swords. You don't have to fence to read this book but by reading it you certainly won't learn HOW to fence. Personaly I thought the book had one minor drawback: the information about famous contemporary fencers focuses almost entirely on Amarican fencers, not a word about the reigning European champions from France, Germany or eastern Europe.
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