A History of Desire When thinking about the diffusion of the Asian fighting arts to the West, we must distinguish between the history of the martial arts as they were practiced, and their evolution as symbols within... Continue Reading →
Matthew Polly. 2018. Bruce Lee: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster. 656 pages. $35 USD. Introduction Matthew Polly is perhaps the best known and most popular author writing on the martial arts today. His first two books... Continue Reading →
Veronika Partikova and George Jennings. 2018. “The Kung Fu Family: A metaphor of belonging across time and place,”Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas.Volume 13(1), 35-52. A Success Story The latest issue of Revista de Artes Marciales Asiáticas(RAMA) is now available... Continue Reading →
Feeling the Heat Here is a fun fact to consider. The modern mechanical air conditioner was invented by Willis Carrier (a Cornell graduate I might add), not in Arizona or Florida, but in western New York state. It... Continue Reading →
Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom Our daily conversations are made up of innumerable facts drawn from what might be termed, “the conventional wisdom.” The contents of this warehouse of social knowledge are so widely shared that none of us stop... Continue Reading →
Winning and Losing In the movies martial artists win their battles. Early losses, inserted into a script for the purposes of “character development,” are redeemed in a climatic final scene. Those of us who train, however, know that... Continue Reading →
Introduction Welcome to “Chinese Martial Arts in the News!” Lots has been happening in the Chinese martial arts community, so its time to see what people have been saying. For new readers, this is a semi-regular feature here... Continue Reading →
Telling a Tale Brief biographical sketches of Chinese martial artists are some of my favorite posts to write. I am not sure why, but I find the challenge of reconstructing a very different type of life, or... Continue Reading →
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If true this will be a weighty essay. Yet that was always the thing about Harrison Forman, the renowned photo-journalist, writer and explorer. As a correspondent he was a double... Continue Reading →
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