Very good information. This book was published before some of these ideas were seeping into the mainstream regarding bullies not being insecure, unhappy people deeply neurotic but instead aggressive personalities who never felt the need or desire to conform to societal standards of interaction. For whatever reason, they learned how to use their 'fight' instinct covertly to manipulate, ambuscade and distract people from making demands on their behaviors. The author's ideas of dealing with the behaviors, and recognizing them as aggressive attacks, seem more likely to succeed than the more common attempt to understand the motivations for the behaviors and attempt to make the bully 'feel' better and thus change his own behavior.

My only drawback to this book is with the editing. There are technical errors, where grammatically the sentences are correct but the punctuation leads to an interpretation of the words which is confusing. Also, in a couple places, whole lines of text are literally out of sequence, making the reader look at the first line, jump down 2 lines and then move back one to read the paragraph in order. I hate to admit it but this makes the author's ideas seem less credible. This is obviously a scholarly work, written for the layperson but still, almost a thesis that was published. So having glaring editing errors made me wonder about the veracity of the information. I surmise this was a low-budget production, with the publisher not expecting high sales, and the book was probably edited by computer and not a human being. Sad, since it also takes some of the humanity out of the reading of it. ( )

It's certainly eye-opening to think of people sometimes being purposefully and willfully hurtful. It's a 180 from constantly thinking that people are "just hurting" or whatever. To start thinking about what people want out of a situation can bring a lot more clarity. ( )