Books about Bullfighting from Amazon.com

A brilliant observer in the tradition of Adam Gopnik and Paul Theroux, Edward Lewine reveals a Spain few outsiders have seen. There's nothing more Spanish than bullfighting, and nothing less like its stereotype. For matadors and aficionados, it is not a blood sport but an art, an ancient subculture steeped in ritual, machismo, and the feverish attentions of fans and the press.
Lewine explains Spain and the art of the bulls by spending a bullfighting season traveling Spanish highways with the celebrated matador Francisco Rivera Ordóñez, following Fran, as he's known, through every region and social stratum. Fran's great-grandfather was a famous bullfighter and the inspiration for Hemingway's matador in The Sun Also Rises. Fran's father was also a star matador, until a bull took his life shortly before Fran's eleventh birthday.
Fran is blessed and haunted by his family history. Formerly a top performer himself, Fran's reputation has slipped, and as the season opens he feels intense pressure to live up to his legacy amid tabloid scrutiny in the wake of his separation from his wife, a duchess. But Fran perseveres through an eventful season of early triumph, serious injury, and an unlikely return to glory..
Price: $0.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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.
.
Price: $1.48 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This digital document is an article from Proceso, published by CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V. on February 27, 2000. The length of the article is 1400 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Lacras del espectáculo taurino: nombres y apellidos.(México)(TT: Scabs in bullfighting: names and last names.)(TA: Mexico)(Entrevista)
Author: Leonardo Páez
Publication:Proceso (Magazine/Journal)
Date: February 27, 2000
Publisher: CISA Comunicacion e Informacion, S.A. de C.V.
Page: 74

Article Type: Entrevista

Distributed by Thomson Gale.
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When Bulls Cry: The Case Against Bullfighting is, as the title suggests, a work that puts the bullfight on trial and finds it guilty of extreme brutality and cruelty to animals This is no legal brief, however It is written from an historian's point of view. Michael A. Ogorzaly has researched the bullfight, from its origins to the present, and with this book he exposes the rot that pervades the bullfight world. From the writings of Ernest Hemingway to the videos of Madonna, nothing that espouses bullfighting is spared. Not even the Three Stooges escape his glare. Furthermore, notions of the bullfight's artistry and morality are debunked. Only those who have opposed bullfighting, from monarchs to writers to animal-rights activists, are treated gently. His intention is to dissuade the audience from ever attending a bullfight, the sooner to hasten its abolition. The time is right for such a work. In France, a history of the bullfight in Europe was published recently by art historian Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Moreover, in April 2005, a proposal to ban bullfighting was introduced in the Parliament in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain. His Holiness the Dalia Lama, who backs the bill, also supports the WSPA (World Society for Protection of Animals) campaign, "Culture Without Cruelty." Other supporters of the campaign include Dr. Jane Goodall and Sir Paul McCartney. Obviously, the anti-bullfigting campaign is a worldwide one. Ogorzaly's book is the first one like it in English. This work should be of interest not only to people concerned about the suffering of animals and the increase of violence in the world, but to anyone who reads cultural and intellectual history. The book could also be used as a text for college courses in Spanish and Latin American History as well as courses on Ethics or Animal Rights..
Price: $12.42 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The matador flourishes his cape, the bull charges, the crowd cheers: this is the image of Spain best known to the world. But while the bull has long been a symbol of Spanish culture, it carries more meaning than has previously been recognized In this book, anthropologist Carrie B. Douglass views bulls and bullfighting as a means of discussing fundamental oppositions in Spanish society and explains the political significance of those issues for one of Europe's most regionalized countries. In talking about bulls and bullfighting, observes Douglass, one ends up talking not only about differences in region, class, and politics in Spain but also about that country's ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition. She relates how Spaniards and outsiders see bullfighting as representative of a traditional, irrational Spain contrasted with a more civilized Europe, and she shows how Spaniards' ambivalence about bullfighting is actually a way of expressing ambivalence about the loss of traditional culture in a modern world. To fully explore the symbolism of bulls and bullfighting, Douglass offers an overview of Spain's fiesta cycle, in which the bull is central. She broadly and meticulously details three different fiestas through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a number of years, delineating the differences in festivals held in different regions. She also shows how a cycle of these fiestas may hold the key to resolving some of Spain's fundamental political contradictions by uniting the different regions of Spain and reconciling opposing political camps--the right, which holds that there is one Spain, and the left, which contends that there are many. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities is an intriguing study of symbolism used to examine the broader anthropological issues of identity and nationhood. Through its focus on the political discourse of bulls and bullfighting, it makes an original contribution to understanding not only Spanish politics but also Spain's place in the modern world..
Price: $18.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]