Reviews for Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence

The average rating for Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-01-29 00:00:00 Jen Stoner Before I start rambling on about things, I want to say that this book is amazing. I came across it because Sam Harris praised it in Free Will. So maybe you'll give me a little bit of leeway and consider reading it yourself, since it's not just another of those goony MMA books that I read from time to time. Wait, did I just sort of say you should read this book? I guess I did. This is a book about how to stay alive in the unfortunate circumstance that real violence comes suddenly into your life. It's written by a guy whose been in enough real fights, with real dangerous people that he's taken down a prisoner (he's a corrections officer) one-handed without spilling his coffee. He's fought and beat larger men than himself who had the element of surprise and been thinking about the paperwork he'd have to fill out more than the fight itself. He knows what violence looks and feels like. And he writes pretty well, too. The book is ostensibly written for the 'martial artist', to show that what you learn in your gym isn't what real violence is. That because you rip it up while sparring, doesn't mean that when someone jumps you on the street that you're going to not get your ass kicked (or worse) just because you have some techniques that work in training. Why would you want to read this though? Because it's a fairly interesting book, and because it's about something that unfortunately you could come into contact with and if you do, it's apparently not like you see in the movies. I will admit right now, I haven't ever been in a real fight. I was in a few sort of fights as a kid, but nothing serious. I do have a fairly active imagination though, and I'm fairly critical, and from my experiences with martial arts training I've sort of extrapolated some of the lessons in this book on my own. What follows are some stories of someone who has, I think, a fairly decent grasp on the theory of fighting/violence/martial arts, but zero real-world experience. Some experience in the relatively safe confines of a gym, but as this book is quick to point out, sparring is sparring. It's fun, but it's not fighting for real. It's not confronting violence. A couple of stories. A couple of weeks ago I arrived quite early to my Wednesday evening Muay Thai class. Sometimes the trains run really fast and I get from work to class in less than a half-hour. Sometimes they are slow as shit and I barely get to class on time. This night I was very early. I got changed, and I was sitting on the mats with my back against the wall watching the teenage TKD class practicing while I wrapped up my hands and started to stretch a bit. They were doing some kind of fast kick drill, and then they did a drill where one kid would throw a fast kick at the other, and when the other kid saw the kick coming he would deliver an ax kick. The instructor told the kids that when you see a fast kick you do an ax kick to the collarbone of your opponent to stop him. I'm not a TKD person. I've never learned how to do a fast kick, it looks like a less powerful version of a roundhouse kick, and like most of the kicks in TKD it involves no 'telegraphing' with a bit of a step to the side like Muay Thai kicks do (which does telegraph I am about the kick if you are standing in front of someone, but if you were moving around it's not difficult to incorporate the step into your footwork and just kick instead of say stepping to your left (if you were going to throw a rear roundhouse kick from a standard fighting stance). An axe kick, is sort of a kick where you kick your leg straight up, and then bring it down on the person (like an axe swinging, sort of). According to the drill, if you see someone throwing a fast kick at you, you should do an ax kick to stop them. I asked the guy sitting next to me, "Is he serious, that isn't possible", the other guy shrugged. I don't think he thought it was possible but probably figured that our instructor maybe knew something we didn't know. I don't think it's possible. Maybe in the confines of the rules in a TKD competition it would be. Maybe a normal fast kick isn't delivered to a spot on the body that scores a point, and is instead a sort of jab to open up an opponent to deliver another kick that would score a point, but where an ax kick would hit a spot were a point were scored. The technique wasn't presented in this way though. It was presented as if someone came at you with a kick, you stop the kick by doing an axe kick. This would get you hurt in the real world.* A lot of techniques work in martial arts classes because there is an agreement that A does this to B in exactly this way and then B does this move. Repeat over and over again. A is going to throw this fast kick, and probably unconsciously pull the kick more than he or she normally would (because you are already not trying to hurt someone when you are drilling), so that B can have the time to make this unwieldy move work. Or on Monday I learned what to do if a lobotomized person came lumbering at me with both of their arms out in front of them, walking like Frankenstein or an extra in Night of the Living Dead. If I were attacked in a screwball comedy by some funny man who is trying to choke me with two hands I feel fairly confident that I could get him in a clinch with his right arm tied up and then holding down his head with my right arm knee him a few times in the face. This is another technique that would get me hurt in the real world if I were doing to stake my life on it. In class I was going to ask, when exactly would this be useful? But I kept my mouth shut. I had already figured out the answer for myself.** Another story. About fifteen years ago, or so, I was working at Pizza Hut delivering pizza. If you have ever worked at delivering food, you probably have had experiences where people say the oh so funny joke of, hey lets take that guys pizza. You generally shrug these things off as being the moronic things that people say, and usually they are laughing right afterwards and say, "I betcha never heard that one before". Even though technically what they are saying is, lets rob this delivery guy, you know that it's a joke. Not one in good taste maybe, but you don't really feel threatened, or at least not anymore than you do when you encounter dumbasses. This isn't about that though. One day, I was making a delivery out to the Navy Housing, you know those ugly two family houses that all look alike out on Route 29. I made my delivery and I was heading back to the store and I was at a stop light at West Avenue, when I looked I looked in my rear view mirror and saw some fucking redneck jump out of a pick up truck behind me, yell something while he ran towards my car and started to reach for my passenger side door. I hit the gas, ran the red light and the pick up truck followed me. I made a couple of turns and saw the truck continue to follow me. I ran a few more red lights and was thinking thoughts like, fuck, what the fuck is going on. I had (and have) no idea what they wanted. All I knew was angry looking redneck tried to get my car door open and now they were chasing me (I hadn't actually thought of this for years, this book reminded me of what might be my closest encounter with real violence). I don't know what their intentions were. The only thing I thought is these people most likely want to hurt me. Why else would they also be running red lights, unless it was just to fuck with me, in which case they were doing a good job at it (which is probably all they were doing, but who really knows). Once I established, yes they are chasing me, I decided that the best thing to do would be to get back to Pizza Hut. There would be other people there. There would be other drivers, there would possibly be my big scary friend who worked next door as a piercer. Most likely I wouldn't be outnumbered, and more importantly there would be people around so it would be less likely that the rednecks would do whatever it was they wanted to do. So raced back to Pizza Hut. I pulled into the lot while blaring my horn, slammed on the breaks and jumped out of the car clutching my Mark Gonzalez skateboard in one hand by the trucks (at the time I always had my skateboard on the floor right behind the driver seat in my car) and started screaming at the pick up truck something along the lines of 'c'mon motherfuckers'. People I worked with came out to see what I was doing. The pickup truck sped off and nothing happened, except people were wondering why I was acting like a lunatic in the parking lot. What did I avoid in this situation? I don't know. I never had the chance to ask the gentlemen why exactly they wanted to get in my car, why they chased me, what they thought would happen. I don't think if I had jumped out of my car when he tried to get in my car, even brandishing my skateboard as a weapon I would have fared too well. I think I actually handled the situation about as well as I possibly could, although maybe I should have tried to get their license plate number, but at the time I wasn't a big fan of the police, and they already let me down once in a similar incident. I think this book would approve of the way I acted there. I had no fighting skills at all at the time. The Book, sort of One of the interesting things about the book is that it tells you straight up some of things that really happen during a fight. Things you don't think of, or maybe wouldn't expect. What it feels like to have all those fucking chemicals flood your system. You've had the adrenaline rush before, you have an idea what it feels like, but are you ready to try to defend yourself when you have all this shit running through you, and you quite possibly become frozen from the situation? Sparring isn't fighting, but if you've ever sparred you probably have some idea about how scary it is the first time. Generally one of two things happen to someone when they start to spar. They either freeze, not literally freeze, where they don't move at all, but their reactions stop. They can't 'pull the trigger'. They might throw some lazy punches, but they are slow, they are painstakingly decided on so that they are telegraphed way before they are thrown. Or they go nuts and start winging wild shots. Obviously if you are in a situation where physical harm is a grave possibility, you are better off if your reaction is the second. Personally, I had the first reaction. I told myself I was waiting to counter, but I just couldn't throw anything, I could think about everything I learned, and I dwelled on what I should do, but I did nothing more than catch a few punches with my lead hand and then eat some punches and a head kick, that was before I threw up hands up, said that is enough and went to the back door to get some air and try to stop freaking out (I have discovered that I am claustrophobic through my fighting classes. If I get too winded I start to think there is no oxygen in the room and I freak out, if I see a door to the gym is open I can calm down, after reading this book, I've also realized that every time that this has happened it has been during a sparring session, or during the equivalent to sparring in bjj, in other words when there is the possibility of getting injured by another person, I had thought that the problem with sparring was a combination of the headgear which felt sort of suffocating to me, and the mouthpiece that was constricting my breathing slightly just by being worn. I now think it's probably the flood of chemicals that ever relatively benign sparring can induce. Since the first couple of times I've become much more relaxed while sparring, but I've seen similar things happen to other people their first times out). Another unexpected thing happens when you get hit for the first time in the face. It freezes you. Getting hit in the face isn't something we are used to, it makes the brain do a double take. It's probably why hysterical people were traditionally slapped, it makes the brain stop what it is doing and question what is happening. It forces a reset of sorts. It's another thing you might not think would happen in a fight, you would expect to get hit in the face, right? But knowing it is going to happen and having your brain register this new unexpected thing happening that is outside of it's normal experiences are two different things. Getting hit in the face is slightly jarring experience. I'm sure it's even more jarring when you get hit really hard by someone not wearing boxing gloves. There are other things like this that are brought up in the book, but the point is that these are things that could and most likely will happen if you find yourself in a bad situation and they are the kinds of things that, even briefly, paralyze your thoughts and actions. The key thing that this book teaches is that you have to be ready to act. It doesn't try to teach you how to fight, it points out things to look out for, how to avoid bad situations, how to try to deescalate a potentially volatile situation, how to know when it's not going to be possible to talk your way out of it and to recognize that you have to be ready to flee or fight. It's about the things you need to think about before a bad situation even arises, what you know yourself honestly to be capable of, what are the situations and events when you will act right away, and not try to work out what you should do when the situation arises and you're no longer afforded the luxury of weighing your choices casually. The book peels away the bullshit you see in most martial arts and self defense books. It doesn't try to tell you that of course if an attacker comes at you with a knife you can just do this handy judo throw, shown in eight easy steps and incapacitate your opponent (who will only really be thrown to the ground, and if he wants to hurt you will be right back up to do it). This review probably isn't doing too much to make you want to read it, but it's really quite a great book. Maybe you need to spend way too much of your free time thinking about fighting to enjoy it, but I think it's well written enough, funny enough and told with an engaging enough style that even people who don't spend most of their time at work thinking about how effective different striking combinations really are, and what would be the best thing to do if non-threatening customers suddenly turned threatening could enjoy it. Plus, Sam Harris thinks it's a great book. *Two people of equal skill fighting, the fast kick will be faster, especially if the attacker is throwing this kick. Responding to any attack takes some time, and an ax kick is an unwieldy attack. Even if you were skilled at it, the time it would take to get your leg up into the air to complete the arc to bring down on your opponent would be more than enough time for the attacker to land his attack. I've thought about this 'move' quite a bit, mostly because I've been trying to figure out how it could work. I can't get it to. The only thing I can think is that a fast kick is relatively low-power, but it doesn't need to be. I've seen some advance TKD people throw some very powerful kicks, ones that could knock you over, especially if you are now standing on one foot and need to have balance to keep necessary power generation to deliver a blow that would shatter someone's collarbone. Instead I started to think of what I would do if I were starting to kick someone and they went to respond with a possibly bone breaking ax kick. The best answer I can come up with is mid kick turn the 'fast kick' into a rainbow kick (I'm not making these names up (a rainbow kick is sort of like the ax kick, but it's from the roundhouse kick, but instead of going straight at the target, you sort of jerk your hips and send the kick chopping downwards, ideally right above or into your opponent's knee), and chop his one leg right out from under him. Then when he's on the ground, if you're not feeling sporting, deliver some soccer kicks to the head and body until he is no longer a threat. **Not to be too hasty. Two evenings later I was at work and Karen told a customer that sitting on the floor isn't allowed. He said something to her, and I could only sort of hear it and I turned around to look at him, sitting there on the ground about ten feet away from me, and he gave me one of those stupid tough guy 'hard' stares. I laughed a bit to myself, a bit out loud as I walked away from him. I'm not interested in playing what the author of this book calls the Monkey Dance, you know the ritual chest pumping bullshit that guys engage in. It goes something like, stare, then what are you looking at, some other words, maybe light chest bumping and then maybe if the people watching the cretins doing this nonsense are lucky they would be rewarded with getting to see some fisticuffs, but it doesn't get to this point that often. I find the idea of engaging in bullshit like that to be embarrassing. If I were so inclined to take the stare as a threat that needed to be responded to, and if I didn't mind losing my job, my answer would have been to attack while the dumbass is in a very weak offensive position and where the fight could be won with minimal risk of bodily injury to myself. In this situation I would probably have all the time I needed to put him in some fancy move and maybe impress the one person in a hundred that might see this and admire my technique and not be aghast at what a sociopath I was acting like for attacking someone who only gave me a dirty look.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-06-05 00:00:00 William Rowan I first became aware of Rory Miller when he started posting on the Uechi-Ryu.Com forums several years ago (or maybe he was posting there first, and then I started; I can't really remember). I was, at the time, a youthful aspiring martial arts instructor, just having gotten involved in Tony Blauer's Personal Defense Readiness program, a new black belt in Aikido, and a student of a fraudulent and abusive kung fu instructor (though obviously I didn't know it at the time). I thought I knew a lot more than I did, though I also knew there was a lot left for me to learn. Rory, I knew jack squat about, but I eventually learned that he was (and is) a correctional officer out in Oregon, with a lot of martial arts experience, and a WHOLE lot of experience dealing with violent criminals. Rory and I had a few chats back and forth on the fora - I doubt he remembers most, if any of them. I do, because it became clear pretty quickly that he knew way more about what I was trying to talk about than I did. I think a lot of those threads are gone with the shifting of the forums, which is kind of sad, mostly for me. In any case, I've tried to pay attention to what Rory had to say ever since then. I read his blog regularly (and it's one of the few websites that I've bothered to link to on here), and I follow whatever he's got to say on the forums with interest that I reserve for few others there. When he announced that he was publishing a book, I was intrigued. When the reviews started rolling in, I was excited. It actually took me two tries to get my hands on this book'the first time, my package disappeared, a pattern that repeated itself with a different Amazon order a few weeks later. Amazon replaced it, and I was delighted to see that it arrived before my weekend trip to Austin. So I opened the box up, and packed up this book along with my other belongings for the weekend trip. I didn't really plan on finishing it, but I found I couldn't the book down. Meditations on Violence is a collection of thoughts, observations, and insights from Miller's years of martial arts training and exposure to real violence and real criminals. It's a short text, coming it at under 200 pages, but those 200 pages are packed with good information on a wide variety of topics, including the criminal mind, the complexities of real world violence, ideas about training methods and the aftermath of violence. All of it is information that is valuable for anyone who is interested in, or concerned about, self-defense. I absolutely loved the chapter on "how to think", in which Miller does a fantastic job of laying out how to scratch your own mental programming and really examine not only what you believe, but why you believe it. Miller has a very calm, introspective, but casual writing style. I really enjoy it'it almost feels like I'm sitting around having a conversation with him, instead of reading words on a page. He uses a lot of stories and analogies to help illustrate his examples, which resonates with my own learning style, and I think makes things a lot more memorable. It also helps that he frequently can attach a personal experience to his ideas, which lends a lot of credibility to his thoughts and concepts. He does not present himself as a know-it-all; indeed, he makes it quite clear that there's a lot he doesn't know (including how to ride a motorcycle, I think). It doesn't matter. The best thing that this book does is that it makes you think. It will force you to really, really, examine your training. It may even make you examine your lifestyle. For me, it has done both. If nothing else, I'll look at the bibliographies of books a lot more than I used to. This is not a book of techniques'someone looking for another wrist-lock variation or a different take on how to throw a punch may not get much out of this. Someone looking to enhance their safety and survivability will find it invaluable. I do not, as of yet, have a "required reading" list for my students, but the day I put one together, this will unquestionably be on it.