Harnessing Anger - by Peter Westbrook (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

With Tej Hazarika
To Peter Westbrook, "harnessing anger" means controlling one's fury and channeling it in a positive direction. Westbrook's success in what he once called "that strange white sport" is really just one expression of the self-discipline that has led him to beat the odds, again and again.
Peter Westbrook is listed in The Guinness Book of Records as the all-time winningest American record holder in U.S. National Sabre championships. In 1995, at the age of 43, although the average retirement age for world class tournament fencers is 34, Westbrook won two gold medals for the U.S. at the 1995 Pan American Games. In 1996, he was one of only three American sabrists chosen to compete for the gold in the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, his sixth Olympic Games, an incredible twenty-year Olympic career.
In Harnessing Anger, Westbrook tells how he came to be the first African American to win a national gold title in sabre fencing. The son of an African-American father and a Japanese mother, Peter was raised by his mother alone in poverty in a Newark ghetto. Becoming a fencer at an early age gave him the confidence and the discipline to use an ancient martial art to his advantage both in swordplay and when facing the vicissitudes of daily life in the inner city.
The autobiography of this 6-time Olympian, 13-time U.S. National champion and the only book on his amazing life, Harnessing Anger tells us how Westbrook has overcome strong adversaries on and off the fencing mat.

From the Back Cover

Pete Westbrook's story takes him from urban poverty and a broken family to the highest reaches of sports excellence as 13-time U.S. National sabre champion, 6-time Olympian, and a man who reclaimed the aristocratic art of fencing as a sport available to one and all. As Westbrook tells it, he was able to make this journey because he was blessed with riches: a caring mother, a tough coach, and a martial art requiring skills that could be applied off the mat as well as on. Although traditionally fencing has been the domain of white European aristocrats, a number of history's great fencers have been black, like Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who became one of Napoleon's generals (and was the father of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo). Pete Westbrook has given the history of fencing an American twist. After taking up the sport at the urging of his mother when he was fourteen years old, he learned its psychological discipline and flexible strategy, two keys to fencing that brought him not only national and world championships, but spiritual peace and self-knowledge as well.

About the Author

PETER WESTBROOK is a six-time Olympian athelete. He has been featured countless times in print and electronic media, including appearances on The Today Show, CNN, TBS, and BET, and in The New York Times, People, the Village Voice, the New York Daily News, the Newark Star Ledger, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
TEJ HAZARIKA is a writer and publisher of Cool Grove Press. A graduate of Columbia University, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Candace, and their five-year-old son, Sage.