Gentlemen's Blood: A Thousand Years of Sword and Pistol - Hardcover

Holland, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343667 ISBN 13: 9781582343662

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2003

Synopsis

Barbara Holland guides us lightheartedly through the touchy subject of honor-and how to defend it-in this compulsively readable history of dueling's first thousand years.

The medieval justice of trial by combat evolved into the private duel by sword and pistol, with thousands of honorable men-and not-so-honorable women-giving lives and limbs to wipe out an insult or prove a point. Here are their stories, from Dumas's Three Musketeers to America's founding fathers, including the New Orleans doctors who settled their medical disagreements under The Oaks, the short-lived newspaper editors of America's South and West, and certain twenty-first-century Parisian politicians.

The duel was essential to private, public, and political life. Where it was technically illegal, those who followed the elaborate codes of procedure were seldom prosecuted and rarely convicted: they were obeying a grand old tradition. Gentlemen's Blood is the definitive guide to this courtly violence, from an author called "a witty curmudgeon" by George Will and "a national treasure" by the Philadelphia Inquirer, whose style, according to Kirkus Reviews, "fits somewhere between E.B. White and Andy Rooney."

A Smithsonian Magazine Selection.

About this title

About the Author:

Barbara Holland is the author of thirteen books, most recently Hail to the Chiefs-a BookSense pick-and They Went Whistling. She lives in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

From Publishers Weekly:

In dueling, the author of Hail to the Chiefs finds a surprisingly sturdy axis around which to connect historical figures and incidents as spokes. Holland wheels it all engagingly from the birth of jousting in the 12th century to October 2002 and Iraq's suggestion of a fight among national leaders rather than a war with the U.S. Her arguments about duels surviving in professional sports and business ventures are persuasive, but her anecdotes and digressions carry the narrative. Besides accounts of such famed duel winners as Jim Bowie-or losers, like Alexander Hamilton-she describes astronomer Tycho Brahe getting his nose sliced off, artist Caravaggio slaying a victorious tennis opponent and writer Alexander Pushkin canceling a gunfight in progress because of a snowstorm. Holland also uncovers unknowns with equally remarkable stories, the funniest of which depicts a battle between a man and a dog that "suspected" him of killing its master. Alas, Holland focuses more on the sport of dueling than its messy results. Although she claims duels left a third of their participants dead or seriously injured and that they were "hard on the widows and orphans," she fails to explore the bloody consequences in detail. And while some of her wistful ideas about gentlemen no longer being manly have merit, others, like honor being as antiquated as throwing "virgins down volcanoes," are overwrought. Perhaps the definitive work on dueling remains to be written, but until it arrives, this makes for a fun, fitfully enlightening ride.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1582343667
• ISBN 13: 9781582343662
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256