" Very interesting book. Prior to reading I had no idea how intricate and complicated a bull fight was. Some of the steps and movements are ballet-like, with the added element of danger. At the time Hemingway wrote it, he refers to fact that spectacle had been cleaned up by padding horses the picadors rode, eliminating the sight of dead, gored horses in the the ring. To today's generation, such shedding of blood - horse, bull, and sometimes man - will seem barbaric, put Hemingway puts it all in context. He correctly points out the distinction between an Anglo-Saxon/American pov which might find it all disturbing and disgusting and the Latin/Spanish mindset, which is not so squeamish (this written as various regions of Spain outlaw bullfighting). The epilogue, describing the sights, the people, the scenery, the smells, of Spain is marvelous, and you feel as if you are there. Again, Hemingway displays his powers of descriptive writing, showing him to be the superior writer of nonfiction of the 20th Century. What I didn't like - midway through the book he introduces "The Old Lady," a type of interlocutor he converses with on subjects such as bull fighting, venereal disease, William Faulkner, etc. She then disappears before the end. I have no idea what he was thinking and it would have been a better book without her. Maybe it was an attempt at humor. His gratuitous (in a book about bullfighting) insults of Faulkner are inappropriate here. Also kind of weird was the appendix with reactions of various people - including apparently his sons, and the prototype of Brett Ashley - to bullfighting. Some of it is libelous and I suspect some of the people are conflations or are not real. "
— T.P., 1/13/2014