114 of 117 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is not your father's Karate! Get this book!, August 2, 2000
This review is from: Attack Proof: the Ultimate Guide to Personal Protection (Paperback)
I've been training and teaching Shotokan Karate for nearly 25 years and over the years I've accumulated a sizable collection of books based on various martial disciplines. Many of them talk about "real fighting", but most of them are pretty much the same, emphasizing flashy "cool looking" moves over common sense techniques and skill development. So at first glance at the book's title I was skeptical. However, after reading Attack Proof: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Protection, I enthusiastically recommend it! While I have a lot of classical training under my belt I also know that the streets of Brooklyn are anything but "classical." The book Attack Proof offers both the martial artist and lay person a bare-bones methodology to real self-defense and street survival skills. The author's base their techniques on sound principles of fighting found in most martial arts systems, and support them with examples of real world applications and experiences. I was so impressed with Attack Proof's practical approach to not only fighting, but to street awareness as well, that I bought copies for my sons, both who are trained in Shotokan and one who is a "Rookie" cop with the NYPD. Whether you're a seasoned martial artist, martial arts instructor or just someone who wants to learn enough to protect yourself. You'll find that the techniques and principles taught are understandable and easy to grasp, but most important of all, effective!
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46 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Real World Violence not Dojo Dancing, March 27, 2006
This review is from: Attack Proof: the Ultimate Guide to Personal Protection (Paperback)
This book is what I have been looking for. As a former Marine, SWAT team member, and a reservist I have trained, studied, and researched martial arts and fighting for over twenty-five years and have always felt that something was missing. I have studied Tae kwon do, boxing, Ninjutsu, Muay Thai, and Jujutsu, and while I learned something from each art, the number of techniques I found to actually work in a real fight was very few, even though I became very proficient at utilizing them in the dojo. The dynamic violence of an actual physical altercation can vary so widely that you cannot train or prepare through the use of repetitive action-reaction training. The missing link was filled by the drills and training in Attack Proof.
Attack Proof emphasizes close quarters combat techniques that enabled the Allied soldiers in World War II to beat the superiorly martial arts-trained Japanese in hand-to-hand fighting on islands all over the Pacific. It includes fright reaction training that is essential for anyone that wants to survive a sudden violent encounter, which is something most arts don't teach, and the ones that do don't emphasize it enough (because there are too many other techniques and forms to learn in that art) but it's a cornerstone to Attack Proof training. You won't find lots of cool techniques to impress your friends in here, but what you will learn will put your self-defense training way ahead of anything you will learn in a traditional martial arts dojo. There are many drills designed to build your balance, looseness, sensitivity and body unity to allow you to fight from any angle, position and the beauty of it is that if you do have a martial arts background you'll find that many of the things you will learn in this book will greatly enhance what you know already.
Don't be misled by those who criticize the book for lack of ground fighting; the book DOES include ground fighting but not as a useless grappling or wrestling methodology that is only suitable for competition between people of similar weight classes with rules against attacking the eyes, throat or other vulnerable areas. These sports always have one assumption that negates their use on the street; that you have only one opponent to worry about. Go ahead and wrestle me to the ground and get your arm bar on me while my two buddies stomp your head into mush.
Arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu flourished under the `no holds barred' promotions because the reality was that there were rules against eye gouges and groin ripping; things that are perfectly legal under street fighting. And the idea that a 110-pound woman is going to successfully take a 200-pound attacker to the ground or get into a guard position and fight him off is ludicrous. The ground fighting in Attack Proof is a devastating and deadly form of fighting that can't work in the ring without maiming and killing people, but it's based on movement and not techniques. To see it demonstrated in real life shows you the folly of wrestling, but the idea that Attack Proof drills emphasize during a violent encounter is to explode aggressively and then if possible escape; not to subdue your attacker.
Attack Proof sticks to what works and keeps the techniques to a minimum while emphasizing drills that teach you to use those techniques in an `anything goes' manner that is truly devastating.
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88 of 93 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
And from the other end of the skill spectrum . . ., February 5, 2004
This review is from: Attack Proof: the Ultimate Guide to Personal Protection (Paperback)
. . . here's a review from someone with very little martial-arts experience (a couple of years of Tae Kwon Do about thirty years ago).
It's been suggested that this book isn't suitable for beginners. I disagree; I think it's terrific.
John Perkins's Ki Chuan Do ('way of the spirit fist') isn't just a 'martial art'; this is real, practical, hardassed Taoism in action, the kind that trains your body to move like a mind. Even apart from the close-combat stuff, just doing the exercises -- even for a few days -- will make a palpable difference in how you inhabit your body and navigate your environment. (Try the Ninja Walk and the Vacuum Walk for a couple of days and watch your balance improve -- even if it's already pretty good. Combat aside, this stuff is helpful to e.g. hikers who go on difficult trails. Of course this sort of balance/awareness is a kind of 'self-defense' in a hiking context too.)
The martial-arts portion is probably not for me to judge, but it makes good sense. Essentially, what Perkins is trying to do is teach self-defense to people who actually want to defend themselves. In order to do that, he's cut to the chase, omitting all the formal stuff that makes sense in a dojo (where you can count on your 'opponents' to fall courteously when you throw them) and taking you straight to the awareness/body-unity stuff (which will help keep you alive and kicking when your friendly neighborhood mugger ungenerously refuses to give you time to assume your favorite fighting stance).
If you're already training in a martial art, you don't need to _stop_ or anything; Perkins's 'guided chaos' will simply help you apply your training in a more realistic context. But if you're not already training in one, I think you can feel safe in starting here. Perkins's purpose is, after all, to help beginners develop close-combat skills as rapidly as possible.
As with other martial arts but perhaps even more so, the preferred aim in Perkins's Ki Chuan Do is not to go around beating people up but (as Sun-Tzu also recommended) to avoid violence by never letting it start. Perkins doesn't advise fighting unless you're backed into a corner, and he doesn't hesitate to advise running the heck away if it's at all possible. (All in all, Perkins's book fits well with Gavin de Becker's _The Gift of Fear_ -- a book that, incidentally, appears in Perkins's list of recommended reading.) The most devout peacenik (Perkins's apt phrase is 'pacifist warrior') should be able to get behind this approach.
But make no mistake, if you _aren't_ able to get away from an attacker, Perkins wants you to fight like a brain-damaged wolverine on PCP. And he shows you how.
He accomplishes this not so much by showing you specific blows and such (which he does, but you can learn about most of them by reading e.g. Fairbairn) but by helping you get your body in the right frame of mind, if you know what I mean. His exercises are designed to bring you to a condition in which you don't need to _stop and think_ for that crucial fraction of a second that might make the difference between life and death.
And if you don't have the stomach to deal with e.g. biting, eye-gouging, and scratching, skip this book. It's not for people who enjoy violence, but it's also not for people who refuse to use it even in self-defense.
Underneath it all (and sometimes on the surface too) is a deep layer of philosophical Taoism -- not at the level of a college-freshman late-night purple-hazed bull session, but the kind that you grok in your kishkes or not at all. You can read it all you want, but you won't 'get' the Taoist bits if you don't _do_ at least some of the exercises.
The book _is_ fun to read, though. Perkins and his collaborators are delightfully iconoclastic and generally good company all around. The well-written text is also accompanied by plenty of genuinely helpful photographs.
I'm not competent to decide whether Perkins's approach is appropriate for everyone (although I suspect it is). But if his approach sounds suitable to you, don't stay away from the book _just_ because you're a beginner. That's exactly who Perkins wrote it for.
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