On Bullfighting

An Anchor Books Original

One day, on the brink of despair and contemplating her own mortality, novelist A. L. Kennedy is offered an assignment she can't refuse-an opportunity to travel to Spain and cover a sport that represents the ultimate confrontation with death: bullfighting.

The result is this remarkable book, which takes Kennedy and her readers from the living room of her Glasgow flat to the plazas del toros of Spain and inside the mesmerizing, mystifying, brutal, and beautiful world of the bullfight. Here the sport is death: matadors (literally "killers") are men and, increasingly, women who, not unlike the Roman gladiators before them, provide a spectacle to the crowd, a dance in which their own death is as present as that of the bull. Wonderfully relaying the elements of the sport, from the breeding of the bulls and the training of the matadors to the intricate choreography of the bullfight and its strange connection to the Inquisition, Kennedy meditates on a culture that we may not countenance or fully understand but which is made riveting by the precision of her prose and the passion and humor of her narrative.


Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: 03/20/2001
ISBN: 9780385720816
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.32w x 0.49d

Review Citations: Booklist 02/01/2001 pg. 1033
Publishers Weekly 02/12/2001 pg. 193
Entertainment Weekly 04/06/2001 pg. 114
Library Journal 03/15/2001 pg. 89
Booklist 09/01/2001 pg. 35
New York Review of Books 09/25/2014 pg. 74