Advanced Stick Fighting by Masaaki Hatsumi
|
Book Summary Author: Masaaki Hatsumi Edition: Hardcover Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published) Published: 2005-07-01 ISBN: 4770029969 Number of pages: 208 Publisher: Kodansha USA |
| New | New Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $18.74 | ||
| Used | Used Usually ships in 1-2 business days | $17.85 |
Your purchase is protected by the A-to-z Safe Buying Guarantee. Amazon.com automatically transfers your payment to the merchant so you'll never need to pay a merchant directly. Amazon.com A-to-z Safe Buying Guarantee covers both the delivery of your item and its condition upon receipt.
Book Reviews of the Advanced Stick Fighting
Customer Review: Nearly worthless
Summary: 1 Stars
I've read hundreds of martial arts books over the last 30+ years I've been a practitioner and maintain a library of about 240 of them. It's not often that I come across one that I truly detest but unfortunately this is one of that select group. The truly sad part is that it has much potential. After all, it is written by one of the world's foremost experts on the subject. Okay, here is why I don't think it's worth the paper it is written on:
First off, it is in reality a puff piece, a 20-page book masquerading as a 208 page one. Less than one third of the work actually has any data that you can learn anything from. The rest is superfluous pictures that are only tangentially related to the text, historical illustrations, and a copy of the original text in Japanese (which is neat if you can actually read it I suppose). Most of the photos are intentionally blurred to show movement. One or two like that is kinda cool but in this case it is way, way over done. They are hard to look at and literally gave me a headache by the time I got done. And they have very little to do with explaining what is going on or how to do the techniques. The text is also poorly written (or perhaps merely inelegantly translated) and hard to follow.
If you are looking for an interesting coffee table tome with some artsy pictures go ahead and pick this up. If you want a serious martial arts learning tool get something (nearly anything) else. Hugely disappointing!
Lawrence Kane
Author of Surviving Armed Assaults, The Way of Kata, and Martial Arts Instruction