Rating: 
Summary: Meat and Potato Fighting at its best
Review: If your looking for great self defence buy this!!!!!!!!!!!!! its straitfoward ballroom brawling style of combat that I would trust in the street. It also includes dirty tricks like the the part on stick fighting tecniques and using tree limbs if you dont have have a cane with you plus many other clever/simple tecneqes
Rating:
Summary: A real hoot!
Review: Interested in learning how to kill a man by employing the "Bronco Kick?" Curious as to how you can break a hold by "siezing your opponent's testicles?" Want to know how, "with your bare hands you can beat the man that wants to kill you?" Ever wondered what you would do if you found yourself sharing a railcar with a bloodthirsty SS Officer--armed with only a matchbox? Then this is the book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: balls to the wall
Review: The book 'get tough' truly has balls to the walls techniques - direct and brutal. However, readers should note that this is not the complete hand to hand combat manual that this gentleman published. Some techniques and procedures are actually missing from this "compilation." Secondly, although the techniques are direct and brutal they are limited only to techniques that are executed (1) with combat uniforms (fatigues, boots etc.), (2) standing upright and (3) against one opponent always. In the today's world these techniques may have their shortfalls. The book is good for reference purpose (history maybe) and is not the be all and end all of hand to hand fighting.
Rating: 
Summary: Had merit but overpriced
Review: The techniques offered in this book have merit, but for a more informative book on self defense I would reccomend the books by Bruce Tegner. If "Get Tough" cost $8 instead of $15 it would have been worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: A practical and eficcient training guide
Review: There aren't competition techniques in this book, but only war techniques. This book teaches how to survive, not how to conquest medals. Reading "Get Tough" and practicing the lessons, you will be able to survive in extreme situations. The author teaches unarmed combat, stick, knife and smatchet tecniques, how to secure prisioners and pistol disarming.
Rating:
Summary: A practical and eficcient training guide
Review: There aren't competition techniques in this book, but only war techniques. This book teaches how to survive, not how to conquest medals. Reading "Get Tough" and practicing the lessons, you will be able to survive in extreme situations. The author teaches unarmed combat, stick, knife and smatchet tecniques, how to secure prisioners and pistol disarming.
Rating: 
Summary: Get Tough!
Review: This book is the classic for military combatives!
Guro Dennis Servaes
Rating:
Summary: one of the best hand to hand fighting books in the world
Review: This book was written in the 1940's with the real possibility of a German land invasion of the U.K. W.E. Fairbairn Trained the British Home Guard in this form of hand to hand fighting to compliment their weapons training to thwart such an invasion. The book contains an overview of hand to hand combat for many different situations, but the main strength of this training is that it's easily comprehended and brutally effective. This is the same type of training given to the British S.A.S. and the American O.S.S. commandos during W.W.II. There are recent books which expand this type of training: "Kill Or Be Killed" by Col. Rex Applegate and also related book(s) by John Kary come to mind. This book, however was the first and is a classic. The reader gets a feeling of nostalgia while viewing the drawings which depict the "good guys" as Allied soldiers and the "bad guys" as Nazi soldiers. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn or expand their hand to hand combat skills.
Rating:
Summary: Practical Tips from a Master
Review: This classic WW2 military training manual is simple in approach and very pragmatic. The author writes with authority and the discriptions and illustrations (by 'Hary') are very clear. Some of the advice, such as how to escape the police staight arm bar restraining hold, and how to properly secure a prisoner are hard to find elsewhere. Some reviewers have implied that the material is 'dated' (difficult to -ahem- imagine in a book almost 60 years old) but I did not find this. Many of the techniques are better suited to military or police use than to the street. The only specific problems I found were the advice to hold the thumb straight out when delivering an edge of hand blow (too east for the adversary to grab) and the times to death from varous knife wounds. Minor details. If readers could fight half as well as Captain Fairbairn, they would be tough indeed. A more comprehensive biography of the author would be a welcome addition.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but have been improved
Review: This is a classic, there are no doubts about that. It is the result of one of the first scientific studies of violence in a violent environment by someone who knew what he was doing. What is remarkable about the book is not what is says, but what it do not say. While the book is good in itself, there are much that needs to be known in order to use the contents in an effective manner that is not said in this book. I will try to give a brief summary of this "other" materiel, and some hints to other useful pices of information. The techniques described herein are based on Faribairn's experiences in the service of the Shanghai Municipal Police in the first decades of the 20th century. By this time Shanghai was one of the most violent and nasty places on earth, ever. These techniques were developed, refined and used by men who regularly fought for their lives with very violent and vicious criminals; there is no fancy dojo "what-ifs" involved here. The book demonstrates some simple and efficient techniques for maiming and killing the enemy, and encourages the reader to choose A FEW OF THEM and learn them thoroughly. Unfortunately Fairbairn does not devote much time and space to explain the rationale behind this, but in order to perform a technique automatically -- to encode it as a reflex, which is amust for an effective response -- it has to be trained over and over again. Some authorities claim that 5,000 repetitions is required, with three additional correct ones for every flawed execution. Do the math yourself. This is the reason behind the, for some, staggering simplicity of the techniques -- at least compared to those taught in more traditional martial arts etc. If they are to be learnt as instictively as is necessary, they have to be simple. The techniques do not look "fancy". They are not supposed to, they are supposed to kill. However, the contents of this book has been much improved upon since, and most notably by the author himself and his coworkers during WWII when they incorporated the results from actual experience in the field into the curriculum. That is, allied agents who fought axis soldiers and agents wrote field reports and communicated their experiences to the men responsible for CQ-training, most notable within the SOE. The results of this maiming and killing can be found in the so called "Silent Killing Syllabus" of 1944, basically Fairbairns lecture notes. This curriculum can be found in the book "SOE Syllabus: Lessons in Ungentlemanly Warfare" (ISBN 190336518X), which is also available from Amazon. The focus in that curriculum is even less on "grappling" than in Get Tough! and almost exclusively on open hand strikes with the odd kick to the lower legs; apart from shooting and/or stabbing the opponent. That is, the techniques in the 1944 curriculum are even simpler and more direct, and more brutal, than in Get Tough!. The focus is not on "self defence" but on combat, in fact Farirbairn has stated -- I do not remember exactly where -- that if two men of equal ability fight, the one with the advantage of surprise will win. The nature of the game is to strike first, strike hard and keep on striking until the enemy is either unconcious or, preferably, dead. Beat him to the ground and kick his brains in or jump on him. Fairbairn & Co. stated, quite emphatically, that you are not supposed to fight with your bare hands, you only do so if you are caught empty handed, and you only fight empty handed so that you can get your hands on a weapon. So to get a complet picture of the Fairbairn's work, be sure to read the book on combat shooting, "Shooting to Live", co-authored with E A Sykes and available from the same publisher. He also developed some interesting techniques for use of the stick, which are found in "Get Tough!", and which he later adapted for use with an umbrella. Also, read the book "Kill Or Get Killed", by his American pupil and colleague Rex Applegate for a similar but slightly different approach; and make sure to get J.J. Styers's "Cold Steel" while you are at it for yet another perspective: Styers advocates the use of the fists more than Fairbairn and Applegate do. It is only beacause of the missing pieces of the puzzle that I do not give the book more than four stars. Faribairn should have been able to write a much better book, at least when the quality of his "lecture notes" are taken into account. Whether he did not do this because he, as we all do, laboured under constraints of the politically correct I do not know, but the ugly truths about real combat have never been popular with the wider audience, so to speak.
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