The book I’m going to discuss with you came out a while ago; however, this post is the first book review that I have done for my blog. Therefore, I wanted to start with a title and author that I respect a great deal and highly recommend to anyone interested in a quality work on practical real world self-defense. The book is: “Krav Maga: Real World Solutions to Real world Violence”, by Gershon Ben Keren.
I think this is the best book I have bought in years on the physical techniques of real life street self defense. Furthermore, the quality of the book is very high with gloss pages and full color photos that only enhance the quality of the information contained in the book. Thus, my hat is off to Tuttle publishing for putting such a high class product like this on the shelves. This book reflects well on a “self-defense” industry too often mired in the worst kind of amateurism, and significantly raises the bar in professional presentation and content. Hence, If you want to see more works like this published, as I do, then you need to be supportive of the industry and author, so go out and get yourself a copy.
I found my copy at a local “Chapters” book store so it has been put into wide circulation and should not be a hard book to find. However, If you can’t find it I would recommend that you order it directly from the publisher, it is more than worth the modest price (under 20 dollars in Canada, although that was before our “loonie” took its nose dive) and unlike a lot of self-defense and martial arts books you needn’t bother worrying about wanting to see a copy first, before buying, to check for content and quality, I am vouching for that. It will not disappoint you, if a long time jaded and cynical self-defense researcher like me can find a lot of new and useful material in this book than anyone can.
The book is not huge, about a hundred and ninety pages but it packs in a lot of very interesting information put into a fairly unique format. They shot the copious photos in “real time” and at full speed but with no loss of clarity. Apparently this was a lot more difficult then staging or posing techniques and this commitment to professionalism and functional realism permeates the book. This alone makes it stand out from the crowd of poorly done generic self defense books of which I have seen literally hundreds over the years.
Don’t misunderstand me, there are things that I don’t agree with in the book but there is more than enough solid information and techniques to more than make up for that. The first section of the book is the most generic and unfortunately does not deviate that much from the standard Krav Maga approach. Some of it is still very good and goes into topics like the psychological characteristics of street violence and important ideas like the “interview stance.” While not really anything new they approach it in a highly professional and thought out way.
However, there is still too much of what I consider the problematic Krav Maga methodology that while eschewing the use of sport martial arts and mind sets in street fights they nonetheless advocate techniques taken right from combat sports. Such things as closed fist punching combinations and boxing footwork take up too much space for a book of this size. While this kind of stuff can certainly have its place, this over emphasis on tactics long ago observed to be mostly ineffective for most people most of the time has always been one of the major philosophical and technical differences between Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and Krav Maga.
Remember, this stuff has been around for a very long time and calling boxing punches and karate blocks “Krav Maga” does not make it any more effective. Let me remind the reader that as a kick-boxer and Black Belt in karate I learned nearly identical approaches to self defense years ago and their deficiencies are what largely led me to Brazilian Jiu-jitsu at a time when it was mostly unheard of and no fad. In other words, if this stuff worked so well I would not have had to work so hard to import Brazilian Jiu-jitsu in to Canada for the first time.
That being said they present this generic strike material mostly as pre-emptive options from the “interview stance” and that is the most realistic use of that material. The weakest part of the book is also the weakest part of generic Krav Maga. Using the idea of the “flinch reflex” to justify the use of old fashioned karate like blocks is just dressing up an old and bad idea. I think this misinterprets the evidence and the nature of “flinch reflexes” and again tries to build “natural defenses” around the wrong kind of “flinch response”. This is not a problem unique to Krav Maga but considering all the overwhelming evidence of how easily this kind of blocking breaks down in the real world I am surprised how much attention is still given to it.(For more information check out my blog posts on “The truth About Haymaker Defenses.”) The good news is that some of this methodology is more functional in the context of weapon defenses and that is the next section of the book.
The second section deals primarily with real world weapon assaults and this is where the book really stands out. This is an area that I believe the newer approaches to Krav Maga surpass Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and therefore most other self-defense systems. The information is well researched and presented and is probably the best work on real world weapon assaults that I have read from both a tactical, technical and psychological perspective.
This section emphasis not only sold techniques but also the interchangeability of techniques which is a key concept, (and one I wrote extensively about in my blog post “weapon defenses: A conceptual Approach”). Hence, this book makes a perfect complement to that extensive blog article by supplying some actual physical techniques to go along with the concepts I wrote about.
On top of that there are a lot of tweaks and variations on standard techniques that are recognizable to both Krav Maga and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu practitioners so that makes it a lot easier to understand and integrate. At this point in my career, 25 years of which I’ve been doing Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, if I can look at something and say “shit, that is really good and why didn’t I think of that?” there has to be some innovative material there.
However, I want to make the point that these tweaks are not about making the techniques more complicated which a lot of people are often mistakenly impressed with, but making them both simpler and more functional. Remember the quote from, I believe, Albert Einstein, who said any fool can make things more complicated but genius reveals simplicity. There is a lot of “re-use of techniques” which really can speed up the learning curve of the student and give you a more comprehensive and integrated package.
This weapon defense material is well worth the price of the book by itself and could easily form the basis of any practical weapon defense curriculum. It duplicates or perfectly dovetails with a lot of the material I developed to expand the traditional Brazilian Jiu-jitsu weapon defense curriculum over the years. Once again I don’t necessarily agree with every detail but the concepts and defenses are pretty much compatible with Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and are often continuations of standard techniques that every Brazilian Jiu-jitsu practitioners should have learned. If you haven’t learned the standard Brazilian Jiu-jitsu weapon defenses curriculum well go back and learn it and if you are familiar with it consider this book the next phase of your training.
The rest of the book is standing grabs and hold defenses and there is no section on ground work. Therefore, this book can make a perfect complement to standard Brazilian Jiu-jitsu training since it emphasizes some of the areas that standard Brazilian Jiu-jitsu training has ignored or become weak in.
I sincerely hope that this book reaches a wide audience and in future we can look at parts of it in more detail if enough people become familiar with the methods and want to use it as a reference guide. Don’t hesitate to open a dialog about these techniques, we can all learn from works like this and I am all about research and learning and not about sports or “style” vs. “style” nonsense. Some people may think it is wrong or at the least unusual for a primarily Brazilian Jiu-jitsu practitioner to endorse a krav Maga book, I think that is nuts and as I have written before, my first loyalty is always to the truth. Enjoy the book and I hope it motivates you to train more and search for the truth in self defense.