Master Cheng's New Method of T'Ai Chi Self-Cultivation

Rating:
Summary: CMC's New Method (translated by Mark Hennessy).
Review: A great book, with superb introduction and CMC Tai Chi Chuan form content. Form is discussed in a non-martial context (as opposed to Man-Ching's 13 Treatises), and there are foot diagrams as well. This is *the* book to learn the Simplified 37 Posture form from!

Rating:
Summary: great text and foot diagrams, dreadful photos
Review: For a book that is intentended to be the ultimate guide to the cheng man ching short form it fails miserablery, the quality of the photos drag down the whole book, I cannot overstate how bad they are, hand,hip and shoulder details are not visable at all.
The chapters at the beginning have some amazing insights and the descriptions of the form are fine, as a limited reference and to complete your ching man cheng collection its ok, but for detailled photo's get the Thirteen Treatises.

Rating:
Summary: Good material, but could be more clear
Review: The material contained in this text, like all of Cheng Man-ch'ing's writings, is wonderful. It is a clear discussion of the process of learning Tai Chi, and gives many new ideas to practice. My complaint with this book is with the translator, not the original material. After reading it, I'm left wondering what the translator added to this text. His preface brings up the interesting issue of how the content of the 37 posture form changed while the number of postures did not. However, he doesn't take a position on the argument, and offers no insight as to why the change in content is important to the reader. Also, in the discussion of the form, there are two sets of pictures. One set is of the final posture, and a second step shows the intermediary steps. It is slightly confusing because the two sets of pictures are from obviously different times as Cheng is wearing different cloths in each set. It is unclear from the text if the pictures were like this in the original text, or if the translator pieced them together. Overall, the material in the book is wonderful, but the translator could have done a better job in bringing it forth.

Rating:
Summary: Master Cheng at his best
Review: This is the last of Cheng Man-Ching's Chinese books, untranslated until now. Any Short Yang Form practitioner will find this text invaluable, and will find its detailed instructions very helpful for polishing their form practice. Also, Master Cheng provides a number of essays on martial virtue and the avoidance of mistakes in ones practice, as well as exerpts from the classics of Chinese philosophy. Mark Hennessy's translation skills are known to be excellent, so one can trust the veracity of the text.

Rating:
Summary: Not as good...
Review: This soft-cover book is not as good as the original hard-cover, which was (by the way) one of the two books I used to accompany the initial phases of my own T'ai-Chi journey (of 28 years). The photos lack the clarity of the hard cover and the printed instructions are not as clear as in some of the more modern illustrated instruction books. By the way, this latter comment(regarding the printed instructions) also applies to the hard-cover edition as well.

Rating:
Summary: Not as good...
Review: This soft-cover book is not as good as the original hard-cover, which was (by the way) one of the two books I used to accompany the initial phases of my own T'ai-Chi journey (of 28 years). The photos lack the clarity of the hard cover and the printed instructions are not as clear as in some of the more modern illustrated instruction books. By the way, this latter comment(regarding the printed instructions) also applies to the hard-cover edition as well.