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.