By the Sword

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Touché! - Rated
This is a perfect book for people interested in miscellaneous trivia on sports, history / cultural history, anecdotes on fascinating people and happenings you never heard about. It is true that Richard Cohen does not explain the technical terms of fencing that for him are as familiar as his own palms. For a fencer wanting to know more about the history of his/her sport it would be boring to have them spelled out, and a non-fencer can manage without the technical details. On the other hand, if your knowledge about fencing (like mine) is based on the Errol Flynn movies, a book like this probably stimulates your curiosity and makes you read more about the technique of fencing. For a person with a curiosity in everything unfamiliar this book is a fountain of interest and amusement. In addition to this, "By The Sword" reads like an excellent novel, the author moves in his own world and takes the reader into it with him in a most entertaining fashion. I recommend this book to sportsmen and culture enthusiasts alike.

Fun to read, a little shallow in "technical" details - Rated
The book is an impressively researched history of fencing.
As such, the main goal is the concept of one-on-one combat, first as duels, then, progressively, as a sport.
While the book devotes some pages to swords in general, their military use, and their role in other cultures (like Japan) the majority of the text is devoted to the west and to non-military uses of the sword (including staged fights for movies and theatrical plays).

What the book excels at is a vivid portrait of fencing, with hundreds of historical figures, episodes and little-known facts. As such it is pretty entertaining even for people (like me) who know little or nothing about fencing.

On the other hand, I feel that after having read it I have absorbed a lot of trivia on the subject, but I still feel pretty ignorant about fencing. The author often uses technical terms (tierce, fleche...) which I am unable to visualize in my mind, and this somehow diminishes the experience: lots of the fights described in the text would probably be more striking if I were able to understand what happened.

In a sense, is like reading an history of chess, including the various quirks of famous historical masters, without actually know anything about the game itself.

Perhaps what I wanted is too difficult to express on paper, or would have required too much dry pages with drawings and pictures. The book is still pretty accessible to the layman, and is fun to read, anyway, and I understand why the author prefers to go for the historical episodes and short portraits of famous fencers instead of drab technical pictures.

A good read for the person interested in fencing. - Rated
A comprehensive and entertaining look at swordsmanship down the ages. The author has succeeded well in using anecdotes, history and fact to produce a readable book that avoids trying to cram too much into a small space. I would recommend it to those interested in fencing and sword fighting.

A bit to much to chew... for author and reader alike - Rated
This is a well written book and an impressive work. I quite like it, yet there are things that annoy me and which pulls down my overall appreciation of it

Being a sport fencer since the age of 13 myself, I share Mr Cohen's lifelong love of the sport. I have taken part in international fencing (epée though) and have met (and fenced) many of the persons mentioned in the text. My own fencing master, Bela Rerrich, is being mentioned (p. 403) as well as my ideal as a fencer and boyhood hero Hans Jacobsson. I also have a strong interest in general history as well as fencing history. Of course my background and my insight into fencing gives me another perspective than that of an ordinary reader when I review the book.

My first impression is that Mr Cohen has tried to cover everything about fencing. Such an ambition of course means that the author has to handle parts of the subject where he is not an expert. It also takes its toll of the reader. Sometimes I think the text loses focus and find myself turning a few pages ahead, to see when the chapter ends and what comes next. It is as if Mr Cohen is too much in love with the subject to let go of any part of it. Even though himself a publishing director, I think he would have benefited from the eyes of a critical editor who could have cut down the total text with at least one fourth.

The weakest parts are in the beginning of the book where the history of fencing is described. As example: one, in the history fencing, very important incident is the duel called the "Coup de Jarnac" in 1547, after which French kings never again granted duellists a field for fighting a duel and thus forced duelling to be an all illegal act. This also of course had implications on fencing and how it was being regarded. Rarely in history we can point at an individual event and say: - Here is a turning point, here history actually changed direction. I think Mr Cohen totally fails to recognise the importance of this incident. In his chapter "The Perfect Thrust" he reduces the "Coup de Jarnac" merely to be an example of a secret touch successfully carried out.

Another turning point in the history of fencing was when French fencing masters started to teach parry-riposte in two different movements instead of one. Here I think Mr Cohen is poor both in checking his sources as well as in proof-reading. On page 72 Mr Cohen claims that the master Le Perché de Coudray in 1605 codified a new way to hold the weapon thus allowing a new way of fencing. If the text had been proof-read properly the year would have been 1635, as he correctly states on page 83. Had he checked the sources better though, he would have discovered that the 1635 work of Le Perché is a very illusive piece of paper. Egerton Castle refers to it but puts a '?' behind it in his listing of fencing books. The fencing bibliographers Vigeant (1882) and Thimm (1896) don't mention it. The Italian Gelli (1895) writes that this work can not be located and that Castle only is referring to a "traité", still Gelli thinks that Castle was too meticulous to have made a mistake but choose himself not to include it in his listings. Where and how Castle found it and got to know about it is, as far as I know, still a mystery. Instead we rely on a 1676 version of Le Perche's work. This might seem a trifle but +/-70 years of course makes a lot of difference for a reader expecting accuracy, especially since Mr Cohen jumps forward and backward in the centuries, namedropping celebrities without really telling us why. Before the eyes of the reader comes Mozart, Ignatius Loyola, Napoleon, etc all with some connection, however trivial, to swords.

Moving into the 19th and 20th centuries I find Mr Cohen more on point. I can not comment on the subjects of Japanese fencing, movie fencing, sword swallowing or many of the other areas Mr Cohen moves into, but overall I think the text is much more focused and interesting from here on. I am fascinated with the accounts of nazi-fencing and the story of Helen Mayer. (A little surprised that the author found it worth to include a full chapter on her, when his main source is a biography published in 2002, apparently though he was already working on the story).

In the end the author deals with issues very close in time and only of interest to the fencing establishment. For future readers these things soon will appear as out of date. This unnecessarily dates the book which, if you can let yourself be swept away by the story and the magnitude of information and disregard the errors, will be of great interest to many in- and outside of fencing for many years to come.

In his final acknowledgements Mr Cohen admits there might be mistakes and shortcomings in the text but says that this, "as any past fencer will recognise is the fault of the referee". As a sabre fencer Mr Cohen might be able to make such a statement, myself an epée fencer and an international referee, would not grant me the same permission.

Try Parrying That, Rousseau! - Rated
This is a very enjoyable book on "swordsmanship" through the ages, with fascinating historical tidbits on the equipment and accoutrements, and many exciting, funny (and horrific) anecdotes concerning fencers and duellists. The book has many interesting footnotes, which alone almost justify the purchase price. Here, for example, is one on armor: "It was never called a 'suit of armor,' a phrase that arose only about 1600, but always 'harness.' The expression 'he died in harness' does not mean that a man was, at death, doing his job like a horse, but that he was wearing full armor. 'Armed' originally meant wearing armor- not carrying a weapon." In another footnote in the section on dueling, Mr. Cohen comments favorably on the Greenland Inuits manner of dueling: When a Greenlander considers himself to have been insulted, he challenges the offending party to a "duel of wits." Each man, supported by seconds, composes a satirical song. The songs are sung in front of an audience, which acts as a jury and votes for a winner. After that, the matter is considered to be settled and the men must be friendly towards one another. (This is certainly a lot more civilized and a lot less deadly than the traditional duel!) The book covers every area you could possibly want to know about- there are sections on knights, duellists, samurai, musketeers, swordplay in the movies, Olympic competitors, sword manufacture, injuries, etc. In the section on samurai Mr. Cohen mentions that it was common practice for the warriors to test the sharpness of their new blades by hacking up the corpses of criminals who had been executed! The more corpses you could chop up before having to stop to sharpen the blade, the better the weapon. In the section on the various types of blades, the author explains that the curved weapon known as the scimitar was invented by the horsemen of the Near East. While fighting from horseback it was much easier to swing your arm in an arc and slash away than it was to try to jab someone with a straight blade- hence, the advantages of a long, curved blade. In the section on the movies, Mr. Cohen talks about the sequence in "The Empire Strikes Back" where Darth Vader fought Luke Skywalker. Real swords were used, made with carbon-fiber blades, painted with reflective paint to simulate laser light. The Darth Vader costume was so bulky and restrictive, with poor visibility due to the helmet, that the filmmakers were concerned that Mark Hamill (who was wearing no protective clothing) could be injured if the sword sequences were done with a regular stuntman. So, they brought in an expert swordmaster- Bob Anderson, who had been a British professional champion and British national coach. The section on fencing injuries is not for the squeamish, as Mr. Cohen writes about the dangers of broken blades and the rather unpleasant experience of having a sword lodged in your throat or thrust through your eye. The reason I gave the book 4 stars rather than 5 was that I felt the book could have been a bit shorter- some of the sections ran on a bit longer than necessary and could have been "tightened up" with better editing. Also, the last 200 pages or so, which is about 40% of the book, dealt with Olympic fencing, modern competition and coaches, etc. It may be a sign of my preference for the earlier historical material, but since the book is supposed to be a history of all aspects of swordsmanship I thought this was too much space to devote to just one area of the subject. Still, as you can tell from what I've mentioned above, this book covers a lot of ground and is an interesting (as well as just a plain fun-to-read) book. I probably should end by mentioning the title of my review. It is an exact quote of what the revolutionary judge said to Augustin Rousseau, fencing master to the royal family, when he sentenced poor Mr. Rousseau to the guillotine in 1793!