( 8 reviews )
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Posted: Jul 6 2009
All this book is made of lies. There are no "navaja fighting" schools in Spain. I am from Spain, I have trained for more than 30 years in many martial arts including some western, and I have no information about that. It sounds extrange that Mr. Loriega (not a spanish guy) arrives Spain and finds easily what many martial artists from Spain don't know it exists! If you change the name of the Spanish master by "Joda" and "Navaja" by "laser sable", and "Sevilla" for "Dagobah", then you get "Mr. Loriega" is "Luke Skywalker". I think he would like to, and that is the reason of the book. Mr. Loriega has fully invented the story, just to pack it together with his Manual del Baratero translation and make himself some kind of Spanish Martial Arts Master. Anyway, the book can be read as a novel, and you can enjoy reading it as if you read a book about Luke Skywalker learning laser sable fighting in his Jedi Academy. Both are fiction in the same level.
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Posted: Jan 30 2009
The book is written by the translator of the "Manual del baratero". It seems to be mainly based on this last one and explains the technics of the Spanish fighting art with the knife. This comes with a very interesting study of the historical and socio-cultural context: different styles of fighting, styles of navajas, caring the arms, woman'knife, etc. A very complete book.
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( 0 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jul 10 2007
Sevillian Steel is a great read, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for an introduction to navaja culture. That said, I found the few negative reviews posted here (several anonymously) to be born of either ignorance or disingenuousness. For instance, "Pankratos," who claims to be from Spain, makes the sarcastic comment that "if you go to central park in new york and look beetwen trees you can find a native americans' community living as they do 328 years ago." Actually, many Native American traditions are still very much alive here, such as music, dancing, pottery, cooking, weaving, religion, language, etc., as is readily apparent to anyone who has visited the southwestern United States, or many other parts of the country. As to a navaja fighting tradition, we need not look nearly so far into the past to document its survival. For instance, in "The Story of Seville," Walter Gallichan, who visited the city around 1903, describes the widespread use of the navaja among the criminal class, noting that "it is too often drawn [there] in street broils and for vendetta purposes." And in 1908, the Spanish government passed severe measures against navaja use, due to the fact that "cutting affrays were becoming increasingly common throughout the peninsula." (see N.Y. Times, 1/19/1908) This same article goes on to note that "every rowdy in town and country carried his knife, and, it would seem from police statistics, was ready to use it...the navaja constitutes a particularly dangerous weapon and the wounds inflicted with it are often fatal." During the same era, the navaja was also used in the U.S. by fencers such as Ella Hattan (popularly known as Jaguarina), who learned Spanish knife-fighting from her mother, a Spaniard (NY Times, 4/11/1897). Hattan was still living and practicing in New York City as late as 1906 ( NY Times, 4/29/1906). So there you have it...the navaja is not some exotic, long-extinct arcane weapon, but was, in fact, common throughout the Spanish peninsula as recently as the twentieth century. Is it so far-fetched that a navaja tradition could have survived 80 years (a single lifetime) from this era of widespread use for Mr. Loriega to learn it? I leave the reader to decide. And, as to the assumption that Mr. Loriega's teacher is a fictional entity, I ask, then who is the man pictured with him in the photograph on the Paladin Press website?
