Review: Bruce Lee - A Life

 I enjoyed Matt Polly's book enough that when I saw he had a biography of Bruce Lee I decided to check it out from the library. This is a great book, since despite living only 32 years, Bruce Lee lived an action-packed life and this biography is just as interesting if not more than any amount of fiction that could be imagined.

Born in San Francisco, but growing up in Hong Kong to an upper middle-class famous opera performer, Bruce Lee was the first Chinese American to break into Hollywood in a big way, the one who made Kung Fu popular. But along the way, Matt Polly gives the backstory behind for instance, Shaw Brothers (there's a great story about the Shaw family burying gold, jewels, and watches in the ground in preparation for the Japanese conquest of Singapore, and then digging it up after the war). The origin of the Golden Harvest studio is in here as well.

I enjoyed the documentation of Bruce Lee's inner life as well. For instance, there's a famous incident about when he threw the gauntlet down in front of the Bay Area martial arts community saying that the ancient styles and forms that were being taught were ineffective for fighting, and then getting challenged. The fight was won by Bruce Lee, but rather than glorifying in it, he realized that the fight pointed out weaknesses in his own skills --- he was winded after only a 3 minute fight, and the Wing Chun training he'd had was not as effective against someone who was running away. That led him to adopt a physical fitness regimen to improve his cardio, skipping rope and running. This made him a much deeper character to me than someone who just beat up people. That he damaged his back one day lifting weights that left him bed bound for 3 months also made him a bit more human to me --- it's more convincing than someone who's just preternaturally strong and fit.

Polly doesn't shy away from Lee's faults, from his threatening his PE teacher in school, to his numerous affair when he became a big star, and his antagonistic approach to working with directors, producers, and script writers. I thought he was fair in the way Lee's faults were approached.

Finally, the book introduced the idea that Lee died of heat stroke. Other theories have been broached, and Polly does a good job explaining why they're not credible.

This book was great reading. I've never watched a Bruce Lee movie and maybe I should.