A "must-have" for every soccer coach.

This book was a tremedous resource for our team this year. It made the difference in our set pieces and gave the players confidence in executing them. Everytime we were awarded a free kick or corner kick the players truly saw it as an opportunity to score - and very often we did. Easy to understand and useful diagrams.

While soccer is primarily a dynamic sport with ever-changing positions and opportunities, there are moments that can be scripted - dead ball situations. "Soccer Restart Plays" describes in detail how any team can effectively take advantage of these golden moments and create excellent scoring opportunities. Clear diagrams of corner kick, direct and indirect kicks and throw-ins detail actions and responsibilities of key players. I have coached teams that scored twice in the final at the USA Cup on plays from this book! I high recommend it to any serious coach. Scott Lockwood

This expertly detailed book gives the story of Arab terrorists who took Israeli hostages during the 1972 Munich Olympics. The author does a great job of giving the fundamental reason behind the attack, as well as a detailed chronology of the events that took place subsequently. This book is even more poignant after the events of September 11th, as it shows that the world is still suffering from the plague of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

While I did thoroughly enjoy the book, I do disagree with the author on his reasons for the failure of the eventual rescue mission mounted by the German government. Simply, the author believes that the failure was based on anti-Semitisim by Germans, and the fact that they really did not care what happened to the Israeli athletes. However, after reading between the lines of the book, it seems to me that the failure was more the result of a lack of trained hostage rescue squads in Munich. Yet, this was 1972, and these hostage rescue squads were not commonplace in all cities. Also, it seems that the Germans went out of their way to save the athletes, given the limited resources they had. Many German officials quoted in the book seemed willing to do anything to save the Israelis as they desperatly wanted to atone for the Nazi atrocities and not stir up old anger.

Regardless of this issue, the book does a superb job of telling the tale of the first major incident of Islamic terror. It is a shame that events like this happen, but maybe by expertly chronicling them, we can learn how to prevent them in the future.

I bought this book due to the HBO documentary of the same name. Although I was not born yet, I believe this book is important in educating those of us too young to know the real history of the problems in the Middle East.

The book is about the 1972 Olympic hostage crisis, where most of the Israeli delegation were taken hostage and subsequently killed by a Palestinian group calling themselves Black September (named so because of a battle in which many Palestians were killed by Israeli's in September 1967).

Mr. Reeves has done an excellent job in researching this book, to the point that one is amazed at the almost keystone cop-like appoach made by many German officials in dealing with this problem. Obviously, they (the Germans) were facing an uphill battle dealing with a fanatical terrorist group, all in front of a worldwide audience expecting to watch sporting events pitting country against country. This said, the mistakes are many and made by many different people. In the book, there are the "hawks" and there are the "doves", then there are the Israeli's on foriegn soil trying to get their countrymen safely back home. Mr. Reeves does a great job on the background of the terrorists, giving the personal reasons for (but not justifying) the actions that they took. Great detail is given to the debacle at the airport where everyone was killed. Many questions are raised about what went down there, such as why none of the snipers were given walkie talkies to communicate with one another allowing them to discern who was going to take down who? It was this situation geon awry that made the Germans create GSG-9, their counter-terrorism unit. Mr. Reeves also touched on Operation "Wrath of God". the Isreali revenge mission to assassinate surviving members of the group. This part of the book is just as fascinating and reads like a novel. It shows the resolve of the Isreali's to seek revenge on those who did them wrong. They had there own problems though when they assassinated a suspected member of Black September, who turned out to be an innocent waiter.

All in all, the book is not "enjoyable" but is an important piece of history. ... I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of Middle East conflict and/or terrorism.

One Day in September is a fascinating and well researched book about the events surrounding the 1972 Munich Olympics takeover and subsequent massacre of members of the Israeli Olympics team by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.

The book provides extraordinary details of events leading up to and during the takeover, the negotiations to free the hostages, the events at the airport in which all of the Israeli hostages and many of the terrorists were killed, and the aftermath; including the "Operation Wrath of God" (the Israeli retaliation), the cover-up of mistakes and miscues made by the German government and police, and the thoughts of survivors on all sides in retrospect. There is also a chapter dedicated to providing a short but comprehensive history on what led to the current problems in the Middle East - an excellent lesson for someone like myself who is a novice in this department.

This is one of the most interesting books I've ever read. I had a hard time putting it down once I started reading it. It is a must read for those who have an interest in history, and/or have their own personal memories of the Olympic games of Munich, 1972.

The collection covers a wide variety of drills, from fitness to fundamental skills to tactics. The authors have made a serious effort to index the skills being emphasized, and in large part were successful; it would be possible to plan many, many practices using no other source. The drills are presented clearly, with the text and diagrams interacting to make each drill easily accessible. My only complaint -- and it's minor -- is that there is some repetition; some of the later drills are variations of the earlier ones.

I have been coaching for six years and playing for 20, and I found this to be a very valuable source.

I have owned a copy of this book for over a year. I would rate this book essential for beginning to intermediate soccer coaches. I have coached youth soccer for 4 years (ages 5-10 rec. and select) and have found this book to make selecting drills simple. The drawings are plain ("X's" and "O's") and clearly illustrate each drill. I looked at several other books that utilized nice graphics and photos to show how to run each drill. However, the clear, simple and concise use of diagrams makes the most complex drill easy to understand and run. In addition, each drill is listed by primary area of emphasis (passing, defense, passing, shooting, etc.) so that you can select one or more drills to emphasize the part of the game your team needs to work on. I highly recommend this book as a supplement to coaching soccer to youth players.

This book shines in many different areas. The most important being its ease of use.

So wrote Yeats, and so demonstrates Simon Reeve in this grim story of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the terrorist mastermind behind it, Ramzi Yousef.
In telling this gripping story Reeve provides informative mini-biographies of the first of the apocalyptic terrorists, Yousef, and his guru Osama Bin Laden, as well as the dedicated and driven investigators of the Joint Terrorist Task Force who pursue them.
The latter part of the book then turns to a disquieting exploration of a vast network of Islamist terrorists, visceral in their hatred for America, well trained and financed, and totally commited to visiting destruction upon it. In the next century (meaning the 21st,the Muslim century, as Bin Laden refers to it) explains one of the young terrorists in training, there will only be the believers and the dead.
All those who would attempt to delude themselves into thinking that September 11 was an aberration need to read this book, which serves as both a compelling study in terrorism and an alarm bell in the night.

Here's a final, lurid image of the new jackals that occurs near the end of the book. The scene is the maximum security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, familiarly known as "Supermax." Three convicts, in solitary the other 23 hours of the day, take their hourly exercise together: Ramzi Yousef, Theodore Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh; harbingers, in spite of their incarceration, Reeve convincingly demonstrates, of a violent future relentlessly bearing down upon us from which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to escape.

I'm sure more than a few people read this book when it was released in 1999 and didn't give it much thought. For far too long we ignored what was happening around the world as we focused on gossip. politics and other trivial matters. When innocent people were killed in African embassy bombings or when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, we failed to react.

Author Simon Reeve did care and wrote this informative book that should have been taken seriously when it was written. Today, everyone knows who Osama bin Laden is. Today we know where cities such as Peshawar and Quetta and Kandahar are because thousands died at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania on September 11. Had more people taken heed regarding this type of information, maybe Sept. 11 could have been prevented.

This book begins with a recounting of the first World Trade Center attack. The intent of the terrorists that time were to cause an explosion that would collapse one of the towers into the other. Later on that same terrorist, Ramzi Yousef thought about blowing a score of airliners out of the sky on the same day, He hoped to do so with explosives similar to those used by the failed shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Sound like an ominous foreshadowing of what eventually did take place on Sept. 11? Consider that this book was written in 1998. Obviously the book isn't as fresh and new as it was when it was written but it's still a valuable resource regarding what we face today. While there are other books with more information on bin Laden, Reeve does an excellent job explaining the roots of the terrorism we face.

I find it astonishing that this is the first good book to comeout on Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef.

President Clinton hasidentified bin Laden as America's number one terrorist threat, and yet nobody in the so-called 'serious media' has really bothered to investigate the guy. Thankfully we now have this excellent book, which gets behind the headlines and explains bin Laden's motivation and anger. I found the details of his early years fascinating, especially since the US media have conspicuously failed to explain why he keeps bombing (or trying to bomb) American embassies and kill US servicemen and women around the world.

More than half the book is about Ramzi Yousef, who the author describes as the first soldier bin Laden sent against the West. I found the details of Yousef's crimes absolutely astonishing - if there was a terrorist league table, then Yousef would surely be at number one.

Excellent book. I recommend it to anyone interested in international affairs. I hope the President will read it to understand why people like bin Laden are so angry with the USA (what can we expect if we support undemocratic regimes like the Saudi government).