Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2362821 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Customer Reviews

Gruesome English, out of date, paradoxically excellent
Istvan Lukovich writes grammatical English with a strong Hungarian accent. This book was published in 1971 when electric foil fencing was relatively young. It was reprinted in 1998, but without revision, except for the addition of a glossary.

Despite all this, 'Electric Foil Fencing' is an excellent resource which has an enormous amount to offer the competitive fencer. The book is technically clear sighted, enormously detailed, and absolutely ruthless in its determination to develop electric foil technique that works competitively.

Of course, you can't learn to fence from a book. Typically fencers learn in four ways — through individual lessons from a coach, through group training sessions with exercises, through week-by-week club fencing, and through competition experience.

What this book does is to underpin these four ways of learning with explanation of what is actually going on. Lessons and exercises may be more or less formalised and conventional, depending on the coach. Club and competition fencing, though, is a messy experience. When you win you don't always know why. When you lose badly, it's often hard to come away with any conclusion more solid than 'I guess he was better than me'.

This is made worse by the fact that most fencers begin with traditional fencing technique, and still try to categorise what is going on in traditional terms. You may lose because the other fencer fought in a way which would traditionally be seen as incorrect.

By focusing on actual fencing, Lukovich gives a revealing picture of what is actually happening - and tactics and techniques to make it happen for you. He was one of the first to identify the nuances of how electric technique would differ from traditional technique. He developed ways of talking about it which would actually make the development of the new technique possible.

This book must have been absolutely visionary in 1971. It is still relevant and important today, and is by a long chalk the best of the fencing books I've discovered to date.