This book had great information and went into detail about each technique. This is a good source of information for the person just starting to the intermediate level. I high recommend it.

As a former member of the US Army's 1st Ranger Battalion (1st Special Operations), I found this book an excellent marriage of practical, yet advanced, grappling techniques. Specifically, this book provides the reader with a no nonsense approach to tangible fighting techniques in all situations (e.g., whether inside an alley or passenger plane). In sum, I highly recommend this fighting treatise -- a great work.

Most books are all hype. I have read several books that promised to teach you submission, yet droned on about this and that. This book delivers exactly what it says. There are not pages wasted on anything. ... This book delivers the highest quality of submision techniques I have seen in books yet. If you want a good book on practical offensive no gi submisions this is that book. This book is better than Gene Lebells, Robert Furgsons, and evens the Gracies books. With that aside you might want to pick up winning wrestling moves, and a book on grappling defense.

I bought this book used at the recomendation of my sensei. Mine is a tattered copy and I treasure it. I was suspect about buying it initially because I'm not a great fan of John Stevens' work in general he's good but tends to be a bit diefying. But that was not the case with this book I've re-read it so many times that it is truely in tatters...so I am happy to see it has been re printed. I will buy I hope you do to.

This is not a detailed biogtaphy, nevertheless, the author gives you a good overview of Yamaoka Tesshu's life. Yamaoka lived during a time when Japan was moving toward industrialization, and we get a glimpse of key historical moments during the transition.
There are numerous accounts that give insight to Yamaoka's mindset and character. Thus, no matter what art the individual reader may practice, Yamaoka's approach to training will reinforce the ideals of the serious-minded.

Unlike other books where certain martial arts figures are ridiculously protrayed like gods, Steven's book has humorous stories and Tesshu comes across like a normal human being who achieved everything throigh his diligent search and practice.

The book's strong point...it inspires hard training.

It is a shame that this book is out of print. I regard its appearance before me in an old used bookshop in Florida as a great gift. After reading it I felt compelled to write down a few of its more inspiring passages ... and ended up with a four-page document! Inspiring, and entertaining too. Stevens' account of the life of Tesshu is flavored with scholarship and love. Good luck finding it.

That's a great book, it has all essential data that a a medical student/Intern/Resident is expected to know (or to "carry everywhere"). This is like a small pharmacological memory chip that's always in my shirt pocket. It often helped me to save patients' life right in that moment, before I can find any other larger reference books around... So, just get it!
(Warning: this book has a kind of addicting potential - once you use it, you are gonna use it daily).

As an internal medicine resident this book is absolutly vital to my life and practice. In nearly three years I have not once gone to work without it in my pocket. The book is small enough to carry anywhere, well organized, full of useful information and contains every drug you will be perscribing on a regular basis. Whether you are a medical student or a resident, you need this book!

This is THE most essential, and most used book I own. I get a new one every year because it's so worn out by the end of a year from the use.

The "Tomart Guide" is the only Star Wars price guide you'll ever need. It is comprehensive with just about every production Star Wars item known to exist in the world. Did you know that they made "Star Wars Dog Chow" in Australia in the early 1980's? How about a ceramic tape dispenser where you pull tape from between C-3P0's legs? Or a Boba Fett cake pan...there's no better way to honor the most notorious bounty hunter in the galaxy than a frosted cake with his likeness. From tacky to the timeless, it's all contained within the pages of the Tomart guide, with hundreds of photographs of many of the items listed in the book. No true Star Wars collecting geek should go without it. This is the only Star Wars price guide authorized by Lucasilm, and no other guide is as detailed and thorough as the Tomart guide.

This is it - the only book you will ever need to find what you have been looking for in the STAR WARS universe!

"DO or DO NOT, there is no try." - YODA

Tomart's Price Guide to Worldwide Star Wars Collectibles is the most valuable book any Star Wars collector can own. Stephen Sansweet is the expert in the field of Star Wars collectibles and it definitely shows here. The layout is so easy to use and the book contains many photographs to aid you in your search for what each collectible is worth. This is the bible for Star Wars collectors!

This book has really changed the way I think about clothing. I typically waste a lot of time and money shopping for clothing, but The Ultimate Guide to Shopping and Caring for Clothing has really helped me find ways to preserve the clothes I have and has taught me a few tricks about making wise purchases.

I recommend The Ultimate Guide to Shopping and Caring for Clothing to anyone who wears clothes. The first-aid tips for stain removal have come in handy and I have finally learned how choose the right tie for my husband.

I purchased The Ultimate Guide to Shopping and Caring for Clothing mainly because it includes a section dedicated to bridal gowns. I have to say that before reading this section, the long-term care of my bridal gown was the furthest thing from my mind. I'm really glad that I picked up this book because it helped me choose the right gown that I will be able to enjoy for years to come. When the big day comes, I will heed to Steve Boorstein's advise on the cleaning and preservation of my newly-purchased heirloom.

Vulgarian Goulash is not for the squeamish. Lance is an entertaining and descriptive story teller. Each story stands on its own. His stories are carefully crafted, clever, humorous, disturbing and, in some cases, evokes a very visceral reaction. A GREAT read.

In a word, disturbing. This collection of short stories is unlike you have ever read. The stories move swiftly and in many instances reach a disturbing climax. Few happy endings, but the stories are not easily forgotton. Unlike some fiction, Lance weaves a political undercurrent throughout the book. Yes, we have much to fear from authoritarian leaders. But there's no getting around man's inhumanity to man. Disturbing.

Vulgarian Goulash has left one deep, dark imprint on my psyche. I read several of the stories while traveling through airports on my way to Chicago for a holiday, and the images that were retained haunted several of my susequent days of leisure. Pure enternainment at its most crass. The stories work on several different levels at once, creatively engrossing one in the storyline while introducing political, theoretical, ideological, phenomenological and several other lines of thought to characters from all walks of life. With his piercingly clever style of writing and dark, steamy imagination, Lance will chisel pretty deeply into the people who read it. Can't wait until the movie comes out!

This book about Wannsee is a welcome surprise. It begins in the 1800s, with the financial machinations of those who would ultimately build it, the skullduggery of at least one man who inhabited it (and paid the ultimate price), this appears to be a conglomeration of writings by the author...and cleverly assembled into a single tale of people, their frailties, and the Jewish home that became the ultimate scene of the so-called Wannseee Conference (20 Jan 1942) where the Final Solution was announced by SS-Obergrueppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich to others of the government functionaries, the Old Guard, and senior officials of the Wehrmacht. While others have focused on that event, this book provides and illuminating context (written by a man named Lehrer, "teacher" in German, ironically). Any individual interested in the Holocaust, the development of the Third Reich from the decimation of Germany following the Treaty of Versailles, will find deep earth to uncover in this beguiling and deceptively short volume. Most highly recommended!

Hadassah Magazine Review-January 2002

Wannsee House and the Holocaust
by Steven Lehrer (McFarland, 196 pp. $32.50)

For most of the years after January 20, 1942, the three-story villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56-58, on the shore of Berlin's popular recreation lake, was a footnote in the accounts of the Holocaust. Finally it merits its own book.

Steven Lehrer, a radiation therapist, has documented the history of the infamous site where the Third Reich officially implemented the Final Solution. His book is a companion piece to his forthcoming Hitler Sites (McFarland), which is a historical guide to 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with the life of Adolf Hitler.

Wannsee House traces the villa's background from its construction in 1914 by a prosperous Berlin merchant and its sale in 1921 to a right-wing industrialist to its purchase by Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich with plundered Jewish money as a vacation spa for Nazi security police. Ultimately, it was the location for the conference at which genocide was plotted.

"'God will give him blood to drink!' was the curse of a man hanged for witchcraft that fell upon the inhabitants of Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of The Seven Gables," Dr. Lehrer writes in his introduction. "The Wannsee Villa bears a certain eerie resemblance to Hawthorne's fictional creation, its inhabitants cursed by the evil period of German history to which the house stood witness."

The book, organized as a series of tightly written vignettes, emphasizes that the Wannsee Conference was not the administrative genesis of the Nazis' plans to annihilate European Jewry. Rather, it coordinated and consolidated what was already under way. "By the time of the Wannsee Conference...the Einsatz groups, operating behind the army frontlines, had murdered more than half a million people. Thus there was no need of a decision at the conference to commit mass murder. The Wannsee Conference facilitated the killing."

After World War II, the house became a center for political seminars, then a youth hostel. Fifty years later the building was inaugurated as a historical memorial. In its halls are photographs of Nazi persecution; one room is dedicated to Auschwitz.
The German decision to make the Wannsee house a shrine to victims is another part of the society's effort to remember its past. This book ensures that Wannsee will not be forgotten. --Steve Lipman.

by Steve Lipman The New York Jewish Week July 27, 2001. The language brought Dr. Steven Lehrer to Germany nearly 30 years ago. A radiologist, he had studied German in school, had become fluent, and wanted to see the country.

"I just had a fascination with it because of what happened there," says Lehrer. It means the Holocaust.

The Upper West Side resident kept going back because of curiosity. And because of his books.

"Wannsee House and the Holocaust," which describes the background of the villa on a Berlin lake where the Final Solution was plotted by a small group of Nazi leaders in early 1942, was published recently by McFarland & Co., a small firm in North Carolina. "Hitler Sites," a historical guide to some 150 places in Germany, Austria and France associated with Adolf Hitler's life and career, will appear later this year. It's also being published by McFarland.

Lehrer, 56, who works at the VA Hospital in the Bronx and teaches at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, calls both books the first in English on their topics.

His name on the Wannsee book identifies him only as Steven Lehrer - no Dr. "My medical degree didn't exactly relate to this [subject]," he says.

Working first at a typewriter, then later at a computer, Lehrer has written six books since 1979 on such topics as great medical discoveries, cancer treatments, and examining patients by their heart and lung sounds. He also wrote an introduction to a reissued collection of stories by American adventurer-hunter Frank Buck.

"I guess I'm interested in different things," Lehrer, a Los Angeles native, explains.

His interest in the Holocaust, in how a society where Jews apparently were fully integrated could produce the most-systematic genocide in history, sent him back to Germany some 15 times.

How? One answer, the doctor says, is the people. As a Jew - with a German-sounding name - Lehrer says he felt anti-Semitism, in Germans' eyes and in their words, wherever he traveled. "It hasn't changed at all" since World War II, he says.

First Lehrer did the "Hitler Sites" book. He visited the houses and the schools and the homeless shelters and the infamous Munich beer hall and the Berlin bunker where The Fuehrer supposedly died.

"It's difficult for people to understand how he did what he did," Lehrer says. "If you actually go and see these places" - many of them places of poverty - "you see what made him so angry and bitter. You see the level of anti-Semitism that still exists in these places."

The Wannsee book grew out of his research for the sites book. Lehrer toured Wannsee, a government-administered Holocaust memorial since 1992, five times. "Everything there was in German," discouraging foreign visitors. He couldn't find a book in English about the building and its history. So he decided to write one.

"I felt this was a place American Jews should know about," he says.

Based on research from more than a dozen German books and the on-line archives of German newspapers, he relates the history of the villa, the fates of the 15 participants in the Jan. 20, 1942 conference, and the largely unknown story of a Holocaust survivor who lobbied for the site's designation as a national monument.

The book reads like fiction.

"I like to tell a story," Lehrer says. "I've always been a great admirer of Barbara Tuchman," the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who related historical events through the eyes of their participants. "I've tried to use her approach."

Lehrer's next project is a study of "Jewish entertainers in the Holocaust." That means more trips back to Germany. "I have a reason," he says.

Lehrer doesn't encourage his readers to visit the places he has visited. "I think reading about it is enough."

This is an outstanding book for all those frustrated in their search for creative fulfillment.

In it, the author puts forward some very interesting hypotheses. For example, he argues that it is creative frustration that is basically the root of all that ails society. To someone who suffers from it primarily, I guess it can look that way, and may even in fact be that way.

I'm not certain everything in the book is correct or the best approach to looking at the problem. But I think people struggling with these issues should read it thoroughly and decide for themselves.

In some ways a more masculine approach that Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones or Cameron's The Artist's Way, Pressfield anthrpomorphises artist's block as "Resistance", an enemy to be fought and defeated daily. Seems exhausting, and it probably is.

I'm currently looking around for really effective solutions to this issue. Most advice comes down to "just do it" but this book provides an interesting framework to think about the problem.

I would very much enjoy living in a world where the problem of creative block was solved comprehensively.

This book provides tremendous insite and guidance into increasing your awareness and changing your perspective as a blocked writer. You'll be doing yourself a great favor by reading this book which uses practical, common sense ideas bypassing the huggy feely pandering that other books on this topic subscribe to.

I've recommended this book to every writer I know, plus bought copies for my closest friends. Be prepared to look yourself squarely in the eyes and kiss your excuses goodbye. It's a book you'll read more than once...and be better for it.

an excellent book with excellent reproductions. i enjoyed it.

After working this past summer in the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC and being there for the opening of the Thiebaud show, I can certainly say that I have become filled with a nostalgic longing and a love for both Thiebaud's art as well as the manner in which he comports himself as an artist and as a person. I could have received no better gift from my supervisor at the end of my summer employment than this beautiful and gentle book. Though certainly there is nothing like looking at the works of art themselves, this book was fully capable of stirring my memory...much the same way as Thiebaud's art itself had a few weeks prior. This book is a highly treasured part of my collection of art books...truly a high point of my books in general, and I would highly recommend it to those well versed in the works of this gentleman as well as those who have not yet had the pleasure of his honest and warm friendship. ~greg

I purchased this book right after walking through the Thiebaud retrospective at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I usually don't like to buy books after I've seen the work firsthand as the color never compares with the paintings I had just seen. In this case, though, I was impressed with the reproduction color. As an artist I get to use this book to study how Thiebaud makes his works "sparkle" by painting one color next to another.

At the recommendation of a teaching assistant in one of my classes at Dartmouth College,I purchased this book. I was really surprised about how little I knew about the application process to graduate school. If you have a friend or relative who is applying to graduate school in psychology (the toughest programs to get into, esp. clinical), you need this book to minimize the number of rejection letters you will receive in April. One note though: The authors need to include material on how to do a thesis.

This book was one of the best books I read about grad school in psychology. What I loved about it was that it not only has useful information about applying and interviewing (which is why I bought it), but it also has chapters on many other aspects of grad school, including a few candid chapters that discuss departmental politics (a rarely broached topic). Another great chapter discusses how to juggle relationships and academia, strategies for landing jobs when your spouse is also an academic, etc. There's also a chapter on the clinical internship process, yet another topic that I have not read about in detail anywhere else.

I really enjoyed the opportunity to read more about what grad school is really like, and to hear great solutions to various hurdles that grad students face. Knowing more about the process, warts and all, made me all the more confident that I was making the right choice for myself.

The editors of this text have done a remarkable job of putting together a comprehensive user-friendly guide to assist anyone who is considering a graduate degree in Psychology or other areas within the helping profession. This guide addresses and clarifies the often complicated and ambigious process of selecting, applying, and untimately succeeding in a graduate level psychology program. I purchased a copy for a family member who is currently applying to graduate programs in psychology. She recently commented that the information in this book helped her to make some critical decisions about programs, and what options she will pursue as a graduate student and beyond. It is also an excellent resource for students already enrolled in or just completing their graduate studies. This is a must have resource for anyone considering a graduate program in psychology