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Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations.

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Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations. By Miriam B. Mandel. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2008. xxv + 370 pp. Cloth: $100.00.

"'I started it all, but I doubt if it would have gone quite so far off the track if Hemingway hadn't come on the scene and, as usual, got the picture all wrong'"--so noted Luis Miguel Dominguin later in his life, in response to Hemingway's rendering of his 1959 mano a mano series with Antonio Ordonez (Mandel 61). Dominguin and other Spanish aficionados took some umbrage at Hemingway's (mis)representation of the matadors' joint corridas and individual talents in his serialized and posthumous versions of the text. As Miriam Mandel shows throughout her excellent study, The Dangerous Summer says as much about Hemingway's life, creative struggles, and tastes as it does about the cape work and cultural roots of its two protagonists. "Everything [...] had changed in the quarter-century since Hemingway last "saw bullfights, and to him, of course, that meant that everything was worse. Had he seen the great years of Dominguin's and [Manuel Rodriguez Sanchez's] careers, he might have come to appreciate their talents and art, their innovations and stylistic excellences. But now, mourning the old days, he could find solace only in the slow, classical cape of Antonio Ordonez" (4).

Mandel's book is an excellent scholarly companion to both The...

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