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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Sub-mediocre effort with an abysmal review of martial arts., 8 April 1998
By A Customer
The beginning of this book is the best part. The author clearly states her goals and concerns and then proceeds to elucidate on them a bit. Unfortunately, the first chapter is as good as it gets and everything goes downhill from there. There are gleanings of good information to be found, unfortunately these are among such a huge morass of misinformation and stylistic prejudice that they are swamped. Ms. Lawler's inapparent exposure in any way to any other forms of martial arts besides tae kwon do and even besides her own school of tae kwon do is baffling to me, especially in the light of her book being on martial arts for women, not tae kwon do for women. Her lack of knowledge concerning even the most fundamental aspects of common arts such as judo and aikido is apparent in statements such as "judo and aikido rely on upper body and arm strength" (this may be a paraphrase, as I do not have the book in front of me). This is followed by advice to women to not do arts involving a heavy reliance on upper body strength. However, the basic tenets of judo and, especially, aikido involve movement based around one's center of gravity, hips and legs and are generally well-suited to female martial artists. Such gems of misinformation would have been easily corrected with a brief reference to any of the 10-20 basic aikido or judo books that exist or even a 5 minute conversation with a teacher of these arts. More such biases appear throughout the book and lead one to believe that the author did most of her research on the various martial arts other than tae kwon do by talking to people who didn't practice them. Her views towards the use of weapons by women are nothing less than dismal. She seems to advocate not training in any weapons as they will just get taken away from any woman who attempts to use them. A good hard look at some of the weapons training and self-defense courses out there (as seen in Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defence) would be a much more realistic and fair assessment of the role of weapons in women's martial arts and self-defence training. As a practitioner of an art which does not teach competition sparring, I have very little to say about the majority of the midsection of the book, as it focused quite heavily on that aspect of her art. However, I do find that her attitudes towards males seem to advocate her going all-out on them (including anecdotes of cracking ribs and the like) but them treating her more gently than they'd treat an equally sized male. Again, some valid points, but lost in a haze of sexism. The section on choosing a school was somewhat better, although her focus on and bias towards large, commercial schools was lamentable, as was her bias towards striking and competition arts. Ms. Lawler comes from a large, commmercial dojang and has apparently only participated in a striking, competition-oriented martial art. Suggestions would include not buying this book at all. A much better (although still limited) book is A Woman's Guide to Martial Arts : How to Choose and Get Started in a Discipline, by Monica McCabe-Cardoza. Other suggestions for the author would include retitling the book Tae Kwon Do for Women and/or doing a lot more research on the martial arts in general before proceeding in this vein.
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