"A History of Bullfighting is a compact, digestible paperback from Reaktion Books, in which the author, Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, takes the reader down the bload-soaked streets of Seville in the eighteenth century to the blood-soaked arenas of Latin American in the nineteenth to the blood-soaked manuscripts of Bataille and Hemingway in thte twentieth. . . . [The book] is spectacular in its own right--not just in its descriptions but in its images, culled from bullfighting’s rich visual history."

New Yorker Book Bench blog

 "A terrific history of, and manifesto against, bullfighting by the French art historian Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. She falls squarely in the reformist camp, and her history argues that the sport seduced artists, who glamorized and abstracted a cruel and ugly pursuit into something that bore little resemblance to bullfighting itself. . . . She stresses the brutal labor conditions of the bull farms, and vividly evokes the persistent cruelty of the life of a fighting bull, and quotes approvingly the judgment of the nineteenth-century French journalist Fleuriot de Langle, who encountered the sport on a trip south: ’Everything appalls here.’ . . . Like so many other writers on this ghoulish subject, Hardouin-Fugier’s writing on bullfighting is really writing about the seduction of death. . . . that bullfighting had to offer was only a stylized form of valor and an aesthetics of destruction. In the bullring there was no transcendence of death, just death itself."

Ben Wallace-Wells | New Republic

"In this broad deconstruction of the meanings of bullfighting, Hardouin-Fugier musters copious data through wide-ranging, often novel, examples--art, literature, chronicles. This results in a powerful demythologization of the event and its meanings. Well-illustrated chapters cover history, practices, artistic interpretations, and sociocultural movements that have adopted or rejected the bullfight as a key symbol."

Choice