Rating: 
Summary: Huh?
Review: After reading the reviews offered above, I ordered this book with GREAT anticipation. And was I ever disappointed! The huge, exaggerated, stylized moves would get a person killed (or at least whomped) if used in a street encounter. I'm a student of Escrima, which might sacrifice the elegant for the practical, but having your feet 36 inches apart - as this book shows - during a fight causes you to lose your balance and flexibility of options.All of the examples show the stick fighter facing a single, unarmed opponent. How often will you be attacked by one empty-handed person when carrying 3 feet of hickory, and just how much training would you need to win this encounter? Finally, nearly the whole book is filled with tricky holds, traps and pins most of which are so involved that the bad guy would have to wait patiently while you slip your hand around, grab the other end of your stick and perform a flashy half turn to force him to the ground. The photos show no attention paid to the baddie's left hand where he's probably holding a broken beer bottle and will have loads of opportunity to jam it in your ear. Locks and jams take time and a cooperative or at least drunk, adversary, and give away the greatest advantage a stick offers: reach. If attacked when carrying a stick, don't lock his elbow, hit it! Then hit his collarbone, then his knee cap. If you want to learn to stick fight, get an Insanto book or a tape from Latosa and learn to fight. And save your big fancy moves for the dance floor.
Rating: 
Summary: You want to learn stick fighting? Get this book!
Review: Best book on stick fighting that I have in my library. I haven't seen a better book yet which covers this topic. Get the book, you won't be sorry.
Rating:
Summary: Those crazy ninja jokers!
Review: Ha! This is almost as good as Norman Leff's combat jujitsu book. Here the production value is better, and obviously our heroes are athletes. I like this book a lot for the same reason I like kung fu movies. Here is the secret to the ninja fighting success of the old days. When you attack someone from behind or while they are asleep, or from a distance with a projectile weapon, you have a high probability of success. Why? Because your opponent can't really fight back very well. Reading this book has helped me to understand why ninjas preferred to kill people or beat them up while they were unaware. The sad fact is that people buy this book and its premise. They think it is a worthwhile art for self-defense instead of seeing it as the great joke that it is.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for Jo
Review: I found this to be an excellent text for a refreasher or learning the use of the Jo. The pictures are excellent and with a good training partner you can get most of the basics down. Of course nothing can replace an instructor...but this is a good aid.
Rating:
Summary: This is the best stick fighting book I ever read
Review: I have been a student of the martial arts for 20 years and this is without a doubt the best stick fighting book you can buy!
Rating:
Summary: Appropriate book with good explanations and photographs.
Review: I have been doing jo training for eleven years. This book has shown me things that I have never seen nor thought of. I own a dim-mak book as well and it is amazing how much overlap. In this book the author even uses accurate bone names. Pay attention to the techniques using a hanbo or similar instrument. These techniques and weapons are more powerful than you may think. Many of these techniques would be impractical to use, and he points it out from time to time. Very refreshing. The point of the mover is not to memorize them, but to learn what the weapon and skill is capable of doing. I looked at the back of this book and saw the rediculous pictures and poses. I though that this would be mostly fluff. Those moves are far easier and useful than it first seems. I have used technique 23(a strange cross-wrist scisoring) in too-rough sparing sessions and it worked to great success. My partner had no idea what had happened.
Rating:
Summary: truly excellent
Review: Like other books from Kodansha publishers, this is a very informative book to read, and it avoids repetition of identical moves. Each page is a new technique, and the techniques are grouped in a very logical way. The pictures are extremely clear, the clearest of any stick-fighting book I have seen. If you were going to buy one book on stick fighting, this should be the one!
Rating: 
Summary: A stick fighting must!
Review: Masaaki Hatsumi and Quintin Chambers have presented us here with a fantastic book. It must be understood that Hatsumi is not only a Ninja Grandmaster but also an authority on Japanese weaponry. The text begins with a section on the basic movements.The later chapters deal with techniques against:Fist Attacks, Foot Attacks, Wrist Holding, Lapel Holding, Seizure from behind and Stick holding. Lastly the book is rounded off with a bone crunching section on immobilization techniques. A must for the student of Ninjutsu or weaponry. The photos are very clear and lead you through the journey of knowledge. Buy, enjoy, absorb and compliment your training.
Rating:
Summary: A stick fighting must!
Review: Masaaki Hatsumi and Quintin Chambers have presented us here with a fantastic book. It must be understood that Hatsumi is not only a Ninja Grandmaster but also an authority on Japanese weaponry. The text begins with a section on the basic movements.The later chapters deal with techniques against:Fist Attacks, Foot Attacks, Wrist Holding, Lapel Holding, Seizure from behind and Stick holding. Lastly the book is rounded off with a bone crunching section on immobilization techniques. A must for the student of Ninjutsu or weaponry. The photos are very clear and lead you through the journey of knowledge. Buy, enjoy, absorb and compliment your training.
Rating:
Summary: The opinion of the reader only depends on his own expectatio
Review: O.k., you can rate this book according to many points of view.If you personally like japanese martial arts, you'll love this book and rate it 5 stars because technically it's almost perfect (attending to the limitations of still pictures to moving ones). If you're looking for effectiveness, well, most techniques aren't just quite effective, they're too much artistical. If you have in mind applying those techniques remeber what Morihei Ueshiba used to say: "Projections are a means of dealing whit dead bodies", so you must first apply one or more strikes so that the opponent's resistance is minimized. This way, I'd probably give the book only 2 or three stars. But returning to what I wrote in the beggining, if you're an experienced martial artist and can easily distinguish between effective and non-effective techniques and how to change them in order to increase effectiveness, that's a great book. I wouldn't recommend it to non-martial artists.
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