Customer Rating: Summary: Well done! Comment: This book is really great. The humility of the author and his writing style are excellent. The techniques are well described and the pictures are clear and well sequenced. The high point of this book is the author's exploration of techniques that are questionable or perhaps weak combat techniques. The reality of this sort of discussion is that it exposes the depth of his knowledge, which can only come from trying a technique over and over with different training partners.
There is lots to play with here, so be prepared to spend time to learn the material. You will not be disappointed. It's a great follow on to Hatsumi's book. Customer Rating: Summary: Definitely recommend Comment: Tom Lang's book lays the out stick and cane techniques in a format that a beginner can follow and understand, but he doesn't talk down to the advanced students. The format of breaking down the techniques into steps is not new, but adding a list of common mistakes and adding his personal commentary is more what I expect in a training seminar rather than a book. This format makes this book far more user friendly than the other books on stick and cane in my collection.
The illustrations include excellent close-up shots of hand and wrist position which reduces some of the uncertainty for the beginner and the number of techniques presented provides a good core of locks, chokes, takedowns and disarming techniques for beginning and intermediate students.
For the students looking for more intermediate/long range techniques, the Tom Lang Martial Arts web site has information on striking techniques.
I just wish Tom had expanded on his chapter on "less than reliable techniques." After spending quite a few years working with a cane and finding out the hard way how many of the techniques taught are too slow, complicated or easily countered, this type of information is invaluable and saves precious training time and effort.
The book is not error free and even with the Errata provided, some of the publishing omissions may confuse a beginner until they think about. For someone with a background in stick and cane, these publishing related errors may not even be noticeable because we're used to filling in the blanks when we run into them. These are minor problems, but probably obviously frustrating to any author.
While the cost is a little bit more than I would like to pay, I see it as money well spent. I will definitely recommend this to my students and will be using much of what I learned from Tom Lang's book in future training.
