Self-defense & Judo book review

Those are a plenty of martial art and judo book titles has been published by this day and sure more to come. Any attempt to create comprehensive list only for English language editions will render many pages and would be pretty much useless. And what is about other languages? French, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German all have long standing tradition of publishing original and translated works. With widespread martial arts and judo popularity any language with established publishing tradition sure can come up with its own list of translated and, in some cases, original works that worth a look. More than this, some translations may differ from originals in a meaningful way and, in some cases, including original “add-ons” in form of comments, appendixes, or entirely new chapters that makes it in-fact a new book. How to make sense out of this multitude?

I already gave up collecting “all” martial arts and judo books long time ago. I still have my collection and from time to time I’m adding new titles to it.

In the book review section of my site I will touch only books that stand-out somehow, aren’t widely available, or have something about them that tempts me to put my comments on.

I would not review “Kodokan Judo” by Jigaro Kano (written about 30 years after Dr. Kano’s death by top of Kodokan alumni and includes roughly 30 page preplace from Kano’s pamphlet written in 1930^th) not because this book not worth reviewing, but because it was reviewed too often. Nor I’ll review “Judo Canon” by Kyuzo Mifune even it’s tempting to point out that it’s include feet-lock technique that aren’t part of the nowadays Canon.