SOURCE: Smith, Michael. “The Psychology of the Bull Fight.” Lancet 357, no. 9251 (20 January 2001): 239.

In the following review, Smith praises Kennedy's critical examination of life, death, and bravado in On Bullfighting.

The modest title of this book is misleading. A L Kennedy certainly writes compellingly “on bullfighting”, but her book is also about passion, risk, depression, and suicide—not least the contemplated death of the author herself.

Before beginning this commission, Alison Kennedy dangled her bare feet over the window-ledge of her fourth-floor Glasgow tenement, planning her death. It was, she remembers, a “vaguely peaceful and emptied and smug” Sunday afternoon. On Bullfighting begins with a poignant account of the tragi-comic reason for her decision not to jump.

It was this quiet fourth-floor epiphany that led her to investigate the “complicated, repellent, fascinating, grotesque, sacramental, ugly, ritualistic, haphazard, sacred, and blasphemous” spectacle of bullfighting.

She wanted to write about “people...