Abandoned on page 31 of 493. Jumped around too much for me. Might have made more sense if I had more knowledge of fencing / swords. Did have some fascinating facts like the spades in a suit of cards represent warriors as swords and spades were linked so two stars.

This is a damn dry book - it's straight history, no doubt - but if you care at all for the sword and/or fencing and/or swashbuckling movies there will be something here for you. As an added bonus it's well-written.

Excellent subject but not as well done as I was hoping.

"By The Sword" promises more than it delivers. As another reviewer notes, the subtitle calls it "A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions," but it felt like the main part of the book was about fencing - the sport of the writer.

I had hoped to learn more about Samurai and other swordfighters, but instead learned an awful lot about Hungarian epeeists, among others.

I imagine this is a good intro and there's another book out there that'll be what I want. But this book? Worth the $2 I spent on it. Not much more.

More reviews at my WordPress site, Ralphsbooks.

Middling with some excellent parts. Error ridden, but mostly minor things, and at worst commonly repeated legends. The last portion is dragged down signifigantly with profiles of fencers, where I would have prefered a more in depth look into the evolution of the sport over the past few decades.

A pleasing little history of swordplay and the sword. I bought this book a while back when I had been thinking of getting back into fencing (which I still haven't done) . . . worth reading if you're interested in the subject.

I enjoyed this book tremendously, but I cannot give it more than four stars because egad, it needs to be broken down into TWO books (maybe even three). At nearly 500 pages, with scads of footnotes (BEST FOOTNOTES EVER), it's a bloated book filled with ALL THE SWORD THINGS! and while I loved it, it just tries to do too much. Richard Cohen wants to present the history of the sword AND the history of dueling AND the history of fencing AND the history of fencing at the Olympics, all of it as GLOBAL as possible, and what he needed was an editor who either cut down this book with vicious clarity, or told him to focus on ONE OF THE THINGS and not ALL OF THE THINGS. As it stands, the chapters prior to those on 20th-century fencing tend to be overwhelmed with facts and stories, and haphazardly organized. I also can't tell how he decided what stories to put in a footnote and what stories to leave in the main text--as I said, this book has the BEST FOOTNOTES EVER, but I don't understand what makes some of them footnote-worthy but not text-worthy. I can only assume that, for the sake of the page count, someone chose stories practically at random to stick in the footnotes.

All of this said, Cohen clearly loves fencing and has a deep understanding of it as both a sport and as a discipline (he was a national champion and an Olympian), and I can't think of anyone better-qualified to write such a book or tell these stories. If he writes more books about The Sword--and I dearly hope he does--my wish is that he finds an editor with a firm hand to keep the book on-track and well-organized. A book of great sword stories (even just dueling stories, frankly) would be most welcome.

Mr Cohen, I thank you for this most entertaining book. I got this from the library, but I think I'm going to buy a copy of my own.

I know very little about fencing or the history of the sport. This was just a random book I picked up because it looked interesting and, at the moment, I'm making an effort to read more non-fiction books.

Considering that, I still found this book fascinating. It goes from the early days of swordsmanship right up to modern fencing, and is filled with anecdotes and stories about various 'celebrities' and their fencing habits, duels that have been fought, and the wider public reaction to the act of duelling, as well as delving into the swords themselves. I thought it would be a bit more dry, perhaps a little boring, but I was quite surprised at how much I enjoyed reading it, despite not being a fencer myself. An entertaining and informative read and, really, what more could you ask for?

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