Ever since Ernest Hemingway popularized the fiesta de San Fermín with the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, the world has been enthralled with the concept of running with the bulls. For millions, running with the bulls remains on their bucket list, and for Hemingway fans it is a lifelong dream. For Peter N. Milligan, it is a way of life. Part memoir and part travel guide, Bulls Before Breakfast recounts Milligan's many adventures in Pamplona, Spain. In his dozen years of visiting the fiesta de San Fermín, Milligan has run with the bulls over 70 times and accumulated stories both thrilling and terrifying. Bulls Before Breakfast is the definitive guide to Pamplona, its famed fiesta, and the surrounding Kingdom of Navarra. It is also a memoir of two brothers running with the bulls and exploring every corner of the city, the countryside, the mountains, the beaches, and the famed restaurants of the Basque hinterland. The book focuses on local knowledge, and the hidden mysteries of this closed, private culture and community. Milligan has slowly pried open this trove of secrets over the past twelve years, all while refining the art of getting between the horns of a massive, perfect Spanish killing machine, el toro bravo, and running for his life.

The matador flourishes his cape, the bull charges, the crowd cheers: this is the image of Spain best known to the world. But while the bull has long been a symbol of Spanish culture, it carries more meaning than has previously been recognized. In this book, anthropologist Carrie B. Douglass views bulls and bullfighting as a means of discussing fundamental oppositions in Spanish society and explains the political significance of those issues for one of Europe's most regionalized countries. In talking about bulls and bullfighting, observes Douglass, one ends up talking not only about differences in region, class, and politics in Spain but also about that country's ongoing struggle between modernity and tradition. She relates how Spaniards and outsiders see bullfighting as representative of a traditional, irrational Spain contrasted with a more civilized Europe, and she shows how Spaniards' ambivalence about bullfighting is actually a way of expressing ambivalence about the loss of traditional culture in a modern world. To fully explore the symbolism of bulls and bullfighting, Douglass offers an overview of Spain's fiesta cycle, in which the bull is central. She broadly and meticulously details three different fiestas through ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a number of years, delineating the differences in festivals held in different regions. She also shows how a cycle of these fiestas may hold the key to resolving some of Spain's fundamental political contradictions by uniting the different regions of Spain and reconciling opposing political camps--the right, which holds that there is one Spain, and the left, which contends that there are many. Bulls, Bullfighting, and Spanish Identities is an intriguing study of symbolism used to examine the broader anthropological issues of identity and nationhood. Through its focus on the political discourse of bulls and bullfighting, it makes an original contribution to understanding not only Spanish politics but also Spain's place in the modern world.

This is the definitive book on Pamplona's fiesta and running of the bulls, praised by James Michener and other Pulitzer Prize winners. This chronicle and history has 256 pages and over 130 photographs taken by internationally acclaimed photographers. The volume also essays the American Experience from Hemingway to the present.