I've read a fair number of MA books that seem to me to be mostly compendia of basic techniques, fancified up as `secrets of [insert MA style here]'. I won't go so far as to say these are bad; they're just overblown in their come-on, promising things that they don't deliver. But I was stumped, literally, by Darell Craig and Paul Anderson's Shihan-Te: the Bunkai of Karate Kata. I found the terminological hairsplitting both tedious and opaque (I eventually caved in and read some of the Amazon.com reviews of the book, which suggest that Craig & Anderson's use of technical vocabulary is pretty idiosyncratic). And I had almost no success in linking the discussion in the text to the illustrations that are supposed to make clear both the kata movements and the deep bunkai that C&A say they are presenting, but which they seem to take forever to actually lay out for the increasingly perplexed reader.
One of these days, if I have the time sometime, lol, I'm going to go back to the book and see if it really is as baffling as I found it the first two times I read it (this was before I discovered Rick Clark, Iain Abernethy and that whole luminous approach to kata decoding). But I'd have to say, at this point, that Shihan-Te something to stay away from, unless you actually enjoy getting exasperated by impenetrable discussions of important topics...
