Why We Fight audiobook

Multiple moments during reading when I whispered "Hell yeah, dude" to myselfLick Review Sleeve: 6/10Front Cover: 5/10Random Page: 4/10

3.5 stars.It's a sport that has been around since the age of ancient Greeks: fighting. Why do we fight? Why do we seek out to destroy each other for reasons other than survival? Why do we use our bodies to hurt other bodies? Author Josh Rosenblatt resolved to find out for himself, as he trained day after day for a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight due in 12 months.Fighting has been part of mankind since time immemorial, but to do it for reasons other than survival—sport, entertainment, enlightenment—is something that seem barbaric and irrational. Why do we fight? Personally, I don't like to engage in physical confrontations myself but I have to admit that it's exhilarating to watch people fight in the ring, and I can't explain why. Rosenblatt echoes the same sentiment, but he chooses to learn firsthand what is it about fighting that has enticed many people to get seriously hurt in the arena and enthralled millions of people all over the world.Rosenblatt treats 'Why We Fight' like a personal diary: it explores his deepest thoughts and feelings about the art of hand-to-hand combat, from its ancient to contemporary history, the different forms of combat, and the philosophical aspects of people beating each other up until one concedes or even dies. At the same time, it takes an intimate look into the author's life and how preparing for his big fight is a huge transformation that he chooses to take upon himself, a huge leap of faith from for a guy who refrained from physical violence, and has engaged only in hedonistic pursuits (drinking, being lazy). Why would he—or anyone, for that matter—take up MMA and sign up for a fight that would potentially be life-threatening? That's the crux of the book.It's interesting to see a fighter's point-of-view on what fighting means to him on a personal and even spiritual level. Some fight for the thrill, others fight for material gains. For Rosenblatt, and perhaps many others, he's doing it for existential reasons: to find purpose in life. Only when your life is threatened would you feel most alive, and that's exactly what the author learned for himself. The injuries he has sustained over the months, and the inner demons he had to faced are something that I don't get to read and hear from fighters, so it's very enlightening to read his thoughts in this book.But at times, I feel like Rosenblatt is perhaps being too philosophical. Too zealous. He's waxing lyrical profusely about his upcoming fight, and the whole concept of hand-to-hand combat. Some readers might feel that his writing is pretentious, more so when he's not a professional fighter (he's just doing it for himself; it was a one-off fight after all). So to see him writing so in-depth about fighting makes it feel like the book is a little self-important, albeit interesting.Fighting is not for everyone, but like Rosenblatt has found out for himself, it can be addictive. It's not farfetched to say that professional fighters might be masochistic to be enjoying beating people up in the arena, and sure, it's something that not everyone would understand. With 'Why We Fight', maybe you'd understand a thing or two about a fighter's psyche and mental processes before stepping into the ring. Pretentious or not, it's pretty informative and I hope I never have to go through the same experience he did just to have a rough idea on why people fight.

Dear Josh Rosenblatt, How are you doing under COVID? Fauci basically said we will never fight again, ha. Warning: This is the cliché fan letter. I picked up your book during the lockdown just to maintain me throughout the drought. This is before UFC 249 got cancelled, even before Khabib pulled off. So, there were still things to look forward to. Getting fatter by the day, I took up running again and this was my time to listen to Why We Fight. It is a good combo. Gets me going. The mind wonders off and let uncontrolled it goes to weird places in these solitary, will testing activities. It was a treat to wonder off, this time, with someone else’s streams of consciousness. Familiar in many ways; in some a bit more troubled than my own (in relation to violence for instance), nicely developed and often funny streams. Thank you for sharing the unflattering bits. And then on Friday, they called me. (Here is the cliché.) https://slpssm.blogspot.com/2020/04/w...

Josh Rosenblatt’s “Why We Fight: One Man’s Search for Meaning Inside the Ring,” is one of the better fight books I’ve come across. Rosenblatt decided he wanted to fight at age 33. He had a lot of past he wanted to work through, and his present of living the good life was far from fulfilling. He spent seven years preparing for his debut bout, studying various forms, and deciding it was mixed martial arts that would test him in the way he wanted. He was looking for maximum brutality. He got his first and only fight at age 40.Rosenblatt’s writing strategy is also a maximum effort. He tells us about himself, his motivations and psychology, gives us a history of martial arts, and anecdotes galore. His wide open account of the terror of the ring is beautifully written. There’s a heavy dose of barroom philosophizing about humanity, manhood, and transcendence through physical violence, but only a few pages where the prose goes too purple, and I skipped those without missing a beat of narrative.Fascinating from a fight perspective is his respect for the sweet science. He writes beautifully about his coach, his training, and his sparring practice. It turns out that it’s boxing that wins his first match for him, and he waxes poetic about the beauty of the jab, and the extreme efficiency of the jab – jab – cross combination. It’s all here, desire and motivation, training, self-doubt, build up, fight and victory, followed by let-down, depression, and back to the gym. Rosenblatt ends the book wondering whether he’s going to retire after one fight, or fight on.This is a good read for fight fans, I don’t know about civilians.

Perhaps because I find myself in a similar situation to Josh, perhaps the mesh of writer and wanna-be fighter in the flush of his 40s vigour, perhaps its the blend of biblical and melancholic, but this book really got me. Its literary soul-searching is likely not for everyone. It certainly takes the roundabout route to explain why we fight, eventually concluding that "life is fighting to the point of incapacity and humiliation and shame, and beyond. Life is glorious failure". I'm not sure if that would be a sufficient answer to the reader searching for a rational answer to the question, but not does Josh claim to deliver that scientific rigour. Indeed, the science emerges throughout to be discounted in favour of the biblical, the menacing primal that lurks beneath it all. And I loved that.There's a lot to like about this book in its honesty, in its attempt to encapsulate the struggle which stretches out 10 years into the past. And even further into what Josh describes as a dissolute life. It spoke to me. It won't necessarily speak to many, but perhaps it might. Understanding how a civilised writer might turn his hand to MMA is a story worth telling, and even better when told by the fighter himself with all of the poetry that seems to emerge from the ring. The cruel juxtaposition. The living that emerges from such proximity to death. There is no idealistic fantasy here, not pretence at chivalry or honour. It's brutal and it's glorious and it's lyrical all at once.I loved it.

3.7. That's what I'd rate this book. So why do we fight? Even after reading the book, I'm not certain. But the author, a writer turned martial arts decides to find out by signing up for a single official MMA fight in the cage. This book follows his journey of what ensues beforehand. He attempts to find meaning in what it means to go on a path of "self-destruction" to engage in one of the most "archaic behaviors" that still continues to exist in our modern society. The book is a marriage between the brutal simplicity of fighting in its essence and the philosophies behind it to find out what it really means at the end of the day. Being someone with a history of combat sports, there were parts that I could definitely relate to. However, there were others that really made you think about it. What does it mean to get into a ring with someone, where their goal is to inflict damage on you? Unlike wrestling, judo,etc. this is a fight, where even more so than not your life and will are both on the line. I'd definitely recommend it to martial artists as I think they'd really be able to consider the information from a personal perspective.

An excellent book. I've been taking and teaching various martial arts for over 30 years, and I've often reflected on what you learn about yourself when you face someone else in combat (even sporting combat); Rosenblatt vocalizes many of things I've had floating around in my head for years, everything from the personal discoveries of training in martial arts to the feeling I had, as a Jew who is a trained fighter in the post-Charlottesville era. Written with clarity and honesty, I think everyone who has ever fight trained will find echoes of their own thoughts.

Full five stars.. This book was fantastic and I couldn't put it down!It's the account of someone who decided to take up combat sports relatively late in life. If you've got a passing interest in mixed martial arts you'll get something out of it, but it's definitely geared towards those more fascinated by the meaning behind fighting with a specific ruleset (hence the title).It's well-researched too, the kind of book that's worth acquiring your own personal copy rather than borrowing someone elses (I know I'll be reading this again).

I liked what he said. I am not sure about the human nature of fighting and some bolder claims, but the man really did the research. Not to mention the sacrifice he took to get really deep into the matter. I for one love fighting sports, and see his point, but this book is useful for others that don't really enjoy this type of sport.

I was worried this book would be too macho for me, but this isn't a book about masculine bravado. It's the opposite. It's a story of vulnerability, fear, self-knowledge, legacies, Jewishness, pain, and what it means to be alive with a brain and a body. It reads incredibly quickly, yet is lapidary throughout. I haven't underlined this much since reading Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts.

I don't like boxing or mma, but I really liked this book. Josh's writing style is great and it's a pleasure to read someone writing well about something he loves

ClippingsA thousand beatings would have been better. In the Book of Revelation, God condemns cowards to spend eternity in a lake of fire alongside the “unbelieving and the abominable, and murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers and idolaters, and all liars.” In Dante’s Inferno, cowardly souls are so universally loathed, they aren’t even allowed into hell. They have to hover for eternity at its gates, barred from crossing the River Acheron, allowed neither in nor out, condemned for the sin of having no conviction, of living without “infamy or praise,” of never really having been alive at all. “These of death no hope may entertain,” Virgil tells Dante, urging him past the lowly band with their lamentations and moans, “and their blind life so meanly passes that all other lots they envy. Fame of them the world hath none, nor suffer. Mercy and Justice scorn them both.” Cowardice drains the life out of human beings; it turns them into shadows and makes them contemptible and hateful, something we turn away from instinctually.John Marcher, the protagonist of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” spends his entire life waiting for the arrival of the catastrophe he’s convinced he’s fated to experience, only to discover in the end that the calamity he was doomed to suffer was the realization that he’d wasted his life waiting for it. The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung.An active amygdala under stress stimulates a region of the brain stem called the locus ceruleus to send noradrenaline to the prefrontal cortex, which becomes more active and focused.Without alcohol life ceases to be stimulating or enjoyable. The glimmer is gone. Sufferers drink now not to get high but merely to feel normal. Some neuroscientists call this the “transition to the dark side.”Boxers in Ancient Greece practiced sexual abstinence and extreme self-control, believing sperm was a source of masculinity and strength and not to be tossed away frivolously. Before fights, a boxer would tie up the foreskin of his penis with a small piece of string called a kynodesme to prove his restraint. Kleitomachos, a Theban fighter who won the boxing competition at the 216 and 212 BCE Olympic Games, was famous for his devotion to asceticism and sexual abstinence. Legend has it that he would refuse to participate in conversations about sex and even turned his head away when he saw dogs mating. Kynodesme is the Greek word for a dog’s leash.Another side effect of all that dopamine and norepinephrine is the distortion of time called tachypsychia, from the Greek for “fast consciousness.” The mind is moving so quickly, the outside world slows down.And all it took to wake it up was a willingness to risk the destruction of the body—to discover the soul through the body, like Walt Whitman! For the first time in my life I felt entirely undiminished and unchecked, unmitigated, untouched, beyond the reach of anxiety and self-awareness and even my own poisonous psychic influence to mar. Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul.Pankration, the ancient precursor to modern-day mixed martial arts, took its name from the Greek word for “all powers.” With its blend of boxing and wrestling, pankration was the toughest sport in a brutal age. Fights ended when one fighter surrendered, lost consciousness, or died. During one match in 564 BCE, champion Arrhachion of Philgaleia got caught in a chokehold and was about to slip into unconsciousness when he managed to wrench his opponent’s left ankle out of its socket. The pain was too much for Arrhachion’s opponent and he submitted. By the time the referee pulled Arrhachion from the chokehold, however, the champion was dead. The victory crown was placed on his corpse.

Many moons ago, founder of "The Paris Review" George Plimpton decided that the best way to write about boxing was to get into the ring with a great boxer named Archie Moore (who, thankfully, wasn't a one-punch KO artist). Archie "the Old Mongoose" Moore peppered Mr. Plimpton with his jab and straightened him with crosses. According to the story, sometime after his sparring session, George Plimpton was walking around with blood from the fight still on his shirt, when the writer James Baldwin saw him. James noted the blood, asked, "Is that black blood or white blood?""Blue blood," Plimpton replied. Author Josh Rosenblatt's blood is not blue, but rather (by his own estimation) the blood of a neurotic, if not an outright coward. One day he sees a mixed martial arts fight on television, and is fascinated and yet repulsed by his fascination. His interest (carefully hidden from his well-educated friends and wife) sheds into obsession and he sneaks off to a live show in Texas to watch two nondescript young men pummel each other senseless. Somewhere along the line he gets the idea to train and engage in a professional mixed martial arts fight himself."Why we Fight," is the chronicle of his journey, from a rank amateur to a ranked fighter (albeit admittedly ranked somewhere near the bottom of the 150 registered welterweights in his region). Along the way he marshals mythology, literature, science, and anecdotes from his own life to try to answer the question posed in the title of his book. Why do we fight?His attempts to answer the question yield some true insights, perhaps some wisdom, and several stretches of truly brilliant writing. The portions on ageing, of being on the cusp of middle-age and both envying and hating his younger opponents, were especially stellar. Sometimes, though, the aforementioned neuroses can be a bit grating (he confesses to a desire to do bodily harm to gentiles to avenge historical grievances too many times), and at his weakest he can be a bit of a sophist and a soapboxer. But overall the book is worth your time, if you are interested in combat sports, masculinity, immersive journalism, or simply top flight writing. Recommended.

Dá vontade de nocautear alguém ainda nesta vida.

Great book! I liked the insight into the mind of a fighter, and also some cool life tips along the way. Living in the moment, coming face to face with mortality, really living.