A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting
by Sam Sheridan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sam SheridanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-01-21
ISBN: 0802143431
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting
Book Review: how can someone so obviously intelligent say such dumb things
Summary: 2 Stars
This is a book that is very hard to give a star rating. It has some very good points and it deals with its main subject very well. Sam Sheridan describes the training and fighting lives of MMA, Muay Thai and Western boxing fighters with a good deal of insight and in interesting detail. This is the stated subject matter of the book and if the author had restricted himself to this area, or if he had had a better or more forceful editor, the book would be a lot better for it.
However, when Sheridan strays away from this area the book becomes extremely weak, sometimes to the point of being offensive. When he tries to deal with the antropological and sociological roots of (mostly) male violence he presents a very simplistic argument. In fact, he basically just quotes very short extracts from what must be much larger and more complicated texts and seems to think he has done the job, as it were. If he wasn't going to deal with this area in the complexity it deserves he should have left it out altogether.
The most serious problem I have with the book, however, is the large amount of time the author spends discussing dog-fighting. The subject of dog-fighting is not mentioned anywhere on the book jacket and it has been included because the author seems to think that we can learn something about human fighting sports and arts from it. The arguments he uses to support this are simply ridiculous! The connections he tries to make between dog fighting and boxing, MMA etc just don't stand up to any kind of logical analysis. In the chapter concerning dog-fighting he continuously makes a contection with men fighting in that it is a test of "gameness". He makes no mention of the simple fact that dogs do not have a real choice in whether or not they fight. At the end of the chapter he backs out of a Lethwei ( a particularly tough kind of Myanmarese bare knuckle kick boxing ) because he gets a slightly bad feeling about the promotor. This illustrates just why you cannot compare fighting sports with dog-fighting. Can a dog back out because he gets a "bad feeling" about this one? Does the author think that he turned cur because he backed out of a fight and that he should therefore be culled or does he feel that he made an intelligent choice. I feel that dog-fighting is essentially a disgusting activity that is engaged in basically for money and so that certain people get to see blood spilled but even more than that in this context, it is irrelevent and riduculous to waste about 40 pages of this book on. The author talks about "the responsiblity to experience everything" and the fact that dog-fighting will go on with or without his support. It's hard to think of a more immature attitude. We all have to make choices as to what we believe is right and wrong. How far does the author's responsiblity to experience everything extend, Murder, Rape...you get the point. The "repsonsiblility to experience everything" argument is used when people want to experience something they problably believe is wrong just for the titilation.
All this is a pity because the main subject of the book is, like I have said, dealt with very well. The book just needed a good editor and the author maybe a few more years to grow up.
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