An Anchor Books OriginalOne day on the brink of despair and contemplating her own mortality novelistA. L. Kennedy is offered an assignment she cant refusean opp... » 

An Anchor Books OriginalOne day on the brink of despair and contemplating her own mortality novelistA. L. Kennedy is offered an assignment she cant refusean opportunity totravel to Spain and cover a sport that represents the ultimate confrontationwith death bullfighting.The result is this remarkable book which takes Kennedy and her readers fromthe living room of her Glasgow flat to the plazas del toros of Spain andinside the mesmerizing mystifying brutal and beautiful world of thebullfight. Here the sport is death matadors literally killers are menand increasingly women who not unlike the Roman gladiators before themprovide a spectacle to the crowd a dance in which their own death is aspresent as that of the bull. Wonderfully relaying the elements of the sportfrom the breeding of the bulls and the training of the matadors to theintricate choreography of the bullfight and its strange connection to theInquisition Kennedy meditates on a culture that we may not countenance orfully understand but which is made riveting by the precision of her prose andthe passion and humor of her narrative. «