Bloody Elbow Book Review: A Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan

Sam Sheridanโ€™s A Fighterโ€™s Heart wasnโ€™t a book I had planned on reading, but a good friend passed on his copy at Christmas. Hereโ€™s the Amazon blurb:
Sheridan joined the merchant marines after high school, eventually graduated from Harvard, and worked his way to Australia on a yacht. There, in 1999, he decided to indulge his fascination with fighting, hoping to test himself and explore what has become a mostly sublimated aspect of masculinity. After some months of training in Australia, he moved to Bangkok to train with a legendary Muay Thai (kickboxing) champion. That experienceโ€“and his first professional boutโ€“expanded into a multiyear odyssey in which he trained with Olympic boxers, Brazilian jujitsu champions, and Ultimate Fighting combatants.
This didnโ€™t exactly get me stoked for the book. Oh great, I thought a dilettante from Harvard is going to tourist his way through the world of fighting and then pump out a pompous tome of first person โ€œinsights.โ€ When a cursory scan of the book revealed that a series of injuries (ribs, rotator cuff) prevented him from rolling with the Brazilian Top Team, cancelled his amateur boxing match and a dispute with a shady promoter precluded his participating in a head-butts-allowed match in Myanmyar I was even less impressed. When I noticed there was a chapter on dog fighting I was really turned off and put the book down.
Then when my bud asked if Iโ€™d read the book and launched into a pretty interesting discussion of ideas he picked up from Sheridan, I reconsidered and Iโ€™m glad I did.
I donโ€™t think this is a timeless classic but it is a worthwhile read. The injuries and screw-ups that prevent him from engaging in most of his bouts do give an anti-climatic feel to several of the chapters. But that doesnโ€™t mean he doesnโ€™t glean some real insights from his experiences.
He spends quite a bit of time with Pat Militech and the MFS crew and is backstage with Robbie Lawlor before his UFC loss to Nick Diaz. His bad luck might have been communicable as he travels with the Brazil Top Team to Japan and is backstage with Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira before his third fight, and second loss, to Fedor Emelianenko.
One of the most interesting chapters details his month in Oakland training with Olympic Gold Medal winning boxer (and current WBO NABO supermiddleweight champion) Andre Ward. Wardโ€™s trainer took Sheridan under wing and trained him alongside his boxing thoroughbreds and a promising female boxer.
Sheridan also dabbles in tai chi and spends time at a Buddhist meditation retreat in Thailand, focusing on the internal aspects of the fighting game. And yes, he spends a chapter investigating dog fighting in the Philippines and Thailand. Despite my revulsion, Sheridan does have come to interesting insights into the human psyche of fighting by learning about the loathsome practices of dogfighting. I still donโ€™t approve of dog fighting, but I hardly think it is the most brutal or inhumane practice in our society (industrial pig farming is infinitely worse IMO).
All in all, Iโ€™m glad I read Sheridanโ€™s book and I think his conclusions about the reasons men and women train and fight professionally are interesting and mostly valid.
Hereโ€™s a bit from the conclusion I liked:
โ€œFighting revealsโ€ฆthat manhood, that endless test is a sham, an illusion of sorts; because when you start fighting, you realize thereโ€™s never an end to it, thereโ€™s always somebody better โ€” stronger, faster, bigger, younger, whatever, somethingโ€ฆThe quest to be the toughest in the world is an empty quest, and fighters realize that pretty quickly, I thinkโ€ฆ.Thereโ€™s always someone out there who can beat you. Itโ€™s about being the best you can be, bringing yourself closer to the perfect version.

Book review: Algeria anger of the dispossessed

The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvoโ€™s 1966 cinematic masterpiece, has powerfully shaped western perceptions of Algeria. The film (which features scenes of Algerian freedom fighters being electrocuted by French torturers to the sound of Bachโ€™s musical epiphanies) incarnates the semi-religious national myth that the victorious National Liberation Front (FLN) imposed on Algeria after driving out the French in 1962. The winners in the bloodiest of French colonial wars were presented not just as victims, but as martyrs, almost as saints.
The gulf between this official myth (which, to this day, sustains a highly unsaintly, corrupt and brutal ruling elite) and the terrible realities experienced by most Algerians for the past four decades, is at the heart of this stunningly important book. Martin Evans and John Phillips have an enviable grasp of the complexities of Algerian identities and the countryโ€™s often opaque high politics and are alive to the multiple ironies of Algerian history. Even as the hard-faced former guerrilla colonels who ruled Algeria from 1962 onwards were feted as the darlings of the nonaligned Third World, they ruined a country rich in oil and gas by imposing a nationalising socialism that masked their promiscuous thievery.
By the late 1980s, Algeria was so bankrupt it had to undergo liberalising reforms that made matters worse for anyone not in the inner circle. In 1988, there was an explosion of discontent by young unemployed urban males, who had developed their own culture of football hooliganism, drink and drugs, and rai โ€“ a fusion of North African folk music with the nihilistic political messages of rap, reggae and punk. Algeriaโ€™s military rulers (who alighted on Islamism as a substitute for a discredited socialism) discovered that they could not contain its more radical manifestations, which included populist preachers intent on channelling the rage of the youthful dispossessed against western modernity. The Levi 501s could be combined with a Koran and a Kalashnikov.
After licensing the Islamic Salvation Front party (FIS) in 1989, Algeriaโ€™s rulers, supported by feminists and the diminished fran-cophone middle class, belatedly realised that the radical Islamist view of democracy was โ€œone man, one vote, one timeโ€, although they were no paragons in this respect themselves since the elections called in 1991 were the first since independence.

In response to clear Islamist victories in the first round of the elections, the military launched a preemptive putsch. Neither side gave any quarter. Victims of the armed Islamists included journalists and novelists, as well as those rash enough to have a satellite tuned to โ€œpornographicโ€ French television: their severed heads were liable to end up in the disconnected dishes. The most radical terrorists declared the population โ€œapostatesโ€, which licensed a campaign of rape and throat-slitting against entire villages.
The regimeโ€™s response was to โ€œmake fear change sidesโ€. Prisoners were welcomed to the prison at Blida, where the blowtorch ruled, with the words: โ€œHere we do not know God or Amnesty International: you talk or you die.โ€ General Smain Lamari, the head of the security police, who died last October, contemplated the necessity of killing โ€œ3m peopleโ€ to eradicate Islamism. As several security-police defectors cited in the book have testified, it was far from clear who was killing whom, since some massacres carried out by Islamists were the disguised handiwork of the army and police. An estimated 200,000 people perished in this war, although in western eyes the atrocities were eclipsed by belated revelations from elderly French torturers about their own dirty war four decades before.
In the present day, the war on terror has ensured a flow of arms and funds to a friendly regime that the CIA regards as a valuable window into Islamic radicalism in both the Maghreb and neighbouring states such as Mali and Mauretania. Algeria is a huge source of oil and natural gas, too, for China, Europe and America, none of which will wish to see the departure of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Although the authors do not spell out the wider implications of their study, they have identified a crucial difficulty for the West, one that extends far beyond the borders of Algeria.
Do we continue to mouth homilies about democracy, knowing full well that it may result in the Islamistsโ€™ โ€œone man, one vote, one timeโ€, or do we connive in the repressions of reliable dictators, even though these also affect the cosmopolitan liberal middle class, who, in an ideal world, we would all like to see in power? Or do we take a chance that the Islamistsโ€™ support is essentially an inch deep, mile-wide protest vote that will not result in the imposition of sharia and the dissolution of Algeria (or, come to think of it, Pakistan) into a caliphate? This outstanding book gives materials aplenty to begin answering those questions.