Combat Shooting With Massad Ayoob
Gun Digest Books
December 2011
http://www.amazon.com/Combat-Shooting-Massad-Ayoob/dp/1440218579
My pre-publication-ordered copy came in from Amazon this past weekend, and I finished reading it last night. I found it an excellent and very useful book, one which packs a ton of history, lessons learned, legend and lore, background and analysis into its slim 190 pages. It's a lot bigger book than its size would indicate. There are tons of pictures linked to various portions of the text, in the best of "a picture is worth a thousand words" style. The book is presented in a very warm, personal, almost chatty style of writing, in a fashion that makes reading it very much like an extended conversation with an old friend. Various parts of it have appeared in other publications at other times, but having all the material that appears here gathered between the same two covers and organized efficiently makes it a worthwhile addition to any personal or professional library.
I know the author is something of a lightning rod on various gun boards, including this one. I've been reading his stuff for decades, had the chance to meet him once, have seen him shoot and heard him speak. Personally, I have a great deal of respect for the literal lifetime of work he has put into the field of firearms and self defense. And a lot of that lifetime is shared here, a lifetime of shooting, training, competing, studying, teaching, interviewing people, investigating gunfights, and just hanging around with other shooters.
There are but five chapters - Mindset, Learning Combat Shooting, Three Gunfighters, Competition As Training and Choices. That might seem like a pretty sparse skeleton upon which to build a book, and in fact this is not a weighty or exhaustive treatment of the subject. But there's a lot of material here. I've been paying attention more or less to a lot of this stuff since the early 1970s, and at least some of the same water I saw go under the bridge is included here, but from a point of view I never had. And I'm glad now to get to see things a bit through someone else's eyes, have a chance to learn more about some of the people I heard of but never got to meet, and share some of the experiences I never got the chance to have myself back then. There's a very serious grounding in a very serious subject available here, and not only available but made very easily accessible for anyone willing to take the time to read and remember. There are very few people out there who can read through this book without saying to themselves at least a few times, "I didn't know that."
Massad Ayoob has offered those of us who consider ourselves serious students a very respectable body of written work in a long career in the fields of firearms and self defense. This book is a very worthwhile addition to that body of work, and I highly recommend it to everyone here.