Writing
In 1997, Westbrook published his memoirs, Harnessing Anger: The Way of an American Fencer in which he describes turning his childhood experiences into a drive to succeed at his sport and the inception of the Peter Westbrook Foundation.
In Harnessing Anger, Westbrook tells how he came to be the first African American to win a national gold title in sabre fencing along with reaching international levels of success. Westbrook describes how as the son of an African-American father and a Japanese mother, Peter was aided 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 is the only book on his amazing life. Harnessing Anger tells us how Westbrook has overcome strong adversaries on and off the fencing strip.
'Harnessing Anger: The Way of an American Fencer' (1997), was nominated by the American Library Association for the Book of the Year Award.
Read more about this topic: Peter Westbrook
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation.... I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“I can hardly bring myself to caution you against drinking, because I am persuaded that I am writing to a rational creature, a gentleman, and not to a swine. However, that you may not be insensibly drawn into that beastly custom of even sober drinking and sipping, as the sots call it, I advise you to be of no club whatsoever.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)