Left of Bang

My Amazon review - http://www.amazon.com/review/R1QYZ3H94K7EBL/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

There is a lot of value in this book. Foremost, the authors remind everyone to stay alert. Look for anomalies. If something doesn't seem to fit in, pay attention to it.

The other thing of value is that it provides a language and a heuristic for thinking about the world around us, particularly the behaviors of individuals from which we infer so very much while not being able to articulate why we inferred what we inferred.

I am a civil lawyer and in depositions and court examinations we have have a tendency to privilege the explicit content of a communication over the context. We can easily get into evidence the answer to “what did he say”, but when it comes to a question like “was he angry” the answer is treated like a spooky bit of speculative mind-reading. Yet, it is vital to our personal survival that we be able to distinguish between jest and anger.

This books makes explicit what we've been doing implicitly, namely watching for body language, facial expression, interrelations with others, etc. For years, when I get an objection based on “speculation” to a question about whether a person was angry or sad or whatever, I will immediately drop into physical observations, e.g., was he leaning forward? what expression did he have on his face? was he speaking in a clipped fashion? etc. Essentially, I have been doing what these authors suggest, but retrospectively, rather than prospectively.

By creating a language of anomalies - kinesics, biometrics, proxemics, geographics, iconography, atmospherics - the author's permit an individual to communicate their observations, but, perhaps, more importantly, to organize the observations in a coherent system. I was a fencing instructor at some point. My school was Gaugler's Italian school, which had the virtue of being able to articulate fencing moves. Other schools would just demonstrate, but Gaugler had a language to communicate, and by having a language, the system provided a way of thinking about fencing.

This book does the same thing for “human observation.” I've started to incorporate the ideas of the book into my witness examination, albeit not the language because the language is too arcane for people not familiar with the system. On the other hand, reading this book has motivated me to ask some questions I wouldn't have thought about, such as where were other people standing? what was the observed person doing with his hands?

This book is mostly of use to security professionals. It is not really aimed at the average person. Nonetheless, there are good thoughts here for the civilian, e.g., when you see 3 anomalies, do something; have a hierarchy of decisions so you don't dither; the hierarchy for civilians should be “run, hide, fight.” But there is not, in my opinion, enough here for civilians.

This book is basically an advertising piece to sell the authors' system. The first 20% of the book lauds the authors' system and explains the problems that the status quo has. This a common approach by authors who are trying to interest people in buying the full package, i.e., training, the website, etc., but a person such as myself is already sold; we want the meat not the sizzle, and it took a long time to get into the meat, and when we got there it seemed that we got some terms and an approach....which was fine.

I would give this 3.5 stars if I could. I got material of value from this book, but I thought the advertising took up too much of the early content.