Know How
Cameron-Bandler, Gordon and Lebeau
Real People Press   ISBN 0-932573-00-2
In my review of the forerunner to this book - The EMPRINT Method (also reviewed on this site) - I made what turns out to have been a remarkably prescient comment:

"Chapter 12, on the other hand, is little more than a foretaste of Know How, by the same authors.  It is also, in this reviewer's opinion, far too long and needlessly repetitive.  An ill-judged end to an otherwise praiseworthy book."

Well, it took a few years, but I finally got round to reading Know How.  And I'm afraid it's as dire as my earlier comment seemed to suggest.

One of the things I (literally) look for in a book when I come to review it is the amount of highlighting that I've done.  In this case I found only six passages marked - in a book of 260 pages (main text) - and two of those were things I wanted to mention in the review, not points I want to remember.
For example, in Chapter 10, on Parenting, the book recalls a story told by Milton Erickson about when his son Robert insisted on taking out the garbage (page 228).  Incidentally, the story as told here - compared with the version in My Voice Will Go With You (pages 240-241), published 3 years earlier - skates over certain crucial information.  Why?  Who knows?
Anyway, it's my guess that anyone with a reasonable knowledge of Erickson's methods would probably understand his use of deliberate "pattern interrupts", in a carefully non-confrontational manner, to make a learning point truly memorable.  Not here, though.  Here we are told that:

"Erickson provided his son with an undeniably unpleasant experience." (page 228)

And the incident is referred to again, later on thus:

"A second strategy for providing learning experiences is to create an experience for the negative (unpleasant, dangerous, scorned) consequences of not emulating certain skills or attributes.  We saw and example of this when Milton Erickson apologetically and repeatedly [as in 'twice'] awakened his son to remind him to take out the garbage." (page 250)

As if to compound the error, we are then told of two incidents that are allegedly "similar" to the Erickson story, yet in neither case was the parent's action similar to Erickson's, and in both cases they were clearly designed to create empathy rather than to deliver unpleasant consequences as such.
Maybe it's just me, but if a book is going to pontificate in all directions, there should be a sense that it is based on something more substantial than a collection of opinions and prejudices.

Another indicative flaw, in my opinion, is the repetitive use of the word "evolution", also in the chapter on Parenting.
In the first place, regardless of any other issues involved, it seems remarkably self-defeating to use this term rather than, say, "development", in a book that actually has nothing to do with evolution (in its scientific sense), and which is published in a country where a significant majority of the population regard the idea of evolution as at best suspect and at worst as a downright lie.  With respect, the text seems blissfully unconcerned about its audience's viewpoint.  Unless, of course, this was a deliberate ploy to keep sales figures low.

My second, rather more serious, observation concerns the implications behind the use of this term in relation to parenting.
At one point, for example, we are told that:

"... one of the most enjoyable aspects of having children is witnessing their evolution from infants to (hopefully) happy, fulfilled adults." (page 254)

Now, this clearly isn't literally true, because evolution takes place in the "gene pool" of a population, not in an individual.  And it's equally unclear why "evolution", used as a metaphor, is preferable to a term such as "development".
Taking what I perceive to be the most common usages of the two words, "evolution" implies change from the simple to the complex, from "lower" life form to "higher" life form, whereas "development" means constructive expansion of existing skills, abilities, knowledge, etc.
Unhappily I personally found this distinction to be inherent in the rest of the text of this chapter.  Despite the claim that parenting is not about being a "temporary warden" or a "keeper", the emphasis seemed to be heavily in favour of parenting as something you do to your child(ren) rather than something you do with them.

In fact I'd go one step further and say that this rather paternalistic, directive tone seems to me to permeate the entire book.  Add in the turgid quality of the writing, plus the plentiful padding and repetition, and you have all the ingredients for a total waste of paper.
Twenty years ago, when NLP was still in its relative infancy, books like this survived as much as anything due to a lack of competition.  That safety net has long since gone, and Know How is clearly waaaay past its sell by date.
Use your time wisely - avoid this book!

Brief NLP Therapy
Ian McDermott and Wendy Jago
Sage Publications   ISBN 0-7619-5966-1
I am amazed.  No, I really am.  This book starts (straight after the list of Contents) with a whole page setting out what a wonderful chap Ian McDermott is, how well qualified he is in NLP, and so on.  And yet he calls this book, or allows it to be called, "Brief NLP Therapy".  And in case the publishers imposed that title on him, the actual text makes it as plain as can be that the authors do indeed think that NLP is a form of therapy, for example:

"In introducing NLP as a form of brief therapy, we want to explore with you some of the ways that NLP goes about working with this agenda." (page 7)

and

"NLP, then, is a therapy of what is possible ..." (page 11)

Which kinda makes you wonder what Richard Bandler (creator and co-developer of NLP) could have been thinking of when he claimed that:

"It's important to emphasize that NLP is an educational tool, not a form of therapy.  We don't do therapy."
("www.purenlp.com/nlpfaq.htm" See FAQ 6.   Italics added for emphasis)

To be blunt, my over-riding impression of this book can be summed up in one word - disrespect.
Direspect for truth, disrespect for those therapists who aren't already using NLP, disrespect for the readers in general, and amazingly enough, disrespect for NLP.

As far as disrespecting the truth is concerned, we can start at the top of the front cover, where the title reads Brief NLP Therapy which as we've seen, is a name that describes precisely nothing.  Mind you, having said that, there's hardly anything in the book that relates to "brief" anything, either.  The two "case studies", at the end of the book are suitably brief (6 sessions and on1 session, respectively), but in the rest of the text several cases are described as long term, and most of the rest are so vague it's hard to tell whether they were brief, long-term or anywhere in between.  And to what purpose?  Why not have described it honestly titled - something like "Using NLP in Therapy".  Oh, yes.  The book is part of Sage Publications' "Brief Therapies Series".  Could this be a clue?

The disrespect for therapists from other disciplines, I'm afraid is a form of arrogance that is found all too often in the NLP community, and it's a great shame that it has raised its ugly head yet again.  Are we really supposed to imagine that coaches won't think of dealing with topics like internal dialogue (self-talk) or personal beliefs unless introduced to them by an NLPer?  Are ALL NLPers really "more resourceful with more clients" (p. 130) than anyone else?  And is it really only therapists who use NLP who will "get a reputation for being very effective" (page 136)?  I have absolutely no idea what the authors had in mind when they wrote this stuff, but I can only marvel at finding such a patronizing tone in a book which doesn't even conform to it's own title.

Next we come to disrespect for the reader in general, and here I hardly know where to start.
For one thing, another book by the same authors was published in hardback in the same year as Brief NLP Therapy.  It is approximately 200 pages longer, contains FAR more information on many aspects of NLP which would have been entirely relevant here, and cost precisely 1p (one penny) more than the paperback version of this book!
Following that same line of thought, the contents of Brief NLP Therapy are so light on "how to" information that it reads like not much more than an extended advert for the training courses run by one of the authors.  Indeed, there is a section on "The benefits of taking a training" (more teaching their granny to suck eggs!) on pages 138-140. and of course the onlt training company listed in the "Resources and Training" section (page 172) is the company owned by ... you guessed it!

I don't know how long it took to actually write this book, but it reads to me like something thrown together in a weekend, or less.
Take "sub-modalities", for instance.  They get thrown in completely out of the blue on page 72, and then we have to wait until pages 84-5 before we get a cursory (less than a page) explanation of what submodalities are.
Likewise the NLP modeling notation (actually a kind of shorthand for recording someone's eye movement in a given situation).  The subject is passingly mention on page 54, is re-introduced, but not by the same name so the relationship certainly isn't obvious, on pages 95-6, and briefly re-appears on page 153.
Mind you, that's more than can be said for the poor old NLP fast phobia cure (a perfect subject for a book on brief therapy, you might think).  This first appears, in passing, on page 78, in passing, on page 124, in passing, in a 13 line anecdote on page 134, and on page 139, all together now: IN PASSING!  What is this wonderful process?  How is it carried out?  How does it work?  Those questions, it seems, are "beyond the scope of this book"

And in regard to disrespecting NLP, in my opinion, even here the book is a right mess.  For example, at one point we are told that:

"Within NLP, we don't have to consider whether 'the client needs to stop going over and over the past', or, 'needs to take a more active role in standing up to his boss'.  The client tells us what they need"
(page 91)

Which would be all well and good if it weren't for the closing sentences of a piece of dialogue quoted just one page earlier:

"You've made your point about being messed up by your father's job changes, and I think you and your parents are now about equal.  So you need to choose what's right for you.'" (page 90)

The fact is that some NLP techniques are on the directive side, and there's no point in pretending otherwise.  I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to know that if patients coming for therapy already knew what they needed then they'd go and get it rather than spending money on therapy.

In another section the book quotes what it claims is the definition of an NLP term "transderivational search" (pages 72 and 83).  Given that the authors have been involved with NLP so long, is it not amazing that they are not aware that Dilts' definition of this term is plain wrong?  What he, and they, are defining is a "transexperiential search" (which relates current behaviour to past experience) rather than a "transderivational search" (which deals with the meanings we personally assign to the words we read and hear and therefore how we interpret incoming messages in verbal or written format).
Likewise the set of questions on page 45 headed "Outcome frame questions" are equally inaccurate:

Note the forerunner of de Shazar's "miracle question" in the NLP list, as compared to the lack of any outcome evaluation in the Brief NLP Therapy list other than the vague "What would that do for you?"  The miracle question is actually mentioned in the preamble to the list of Outcome frame questions but somehow never makes it into the list.

To sum up, then, genuine information on NLP is not only in pretty short supply in this book, it is also extremely variable in its reliability.  I cannot think of any good reason to buy this book if it were priced £5.99, let alone at a monstrous £19.99 (that's the paperback - you need a second mortgage to buy the hardback version!).

Bottom line, anyone interested in the use of NLP techniques in therapy would be FAR better off reading Richard Bandler's book Magic in Action (also reviewed on this site), which includes the transcripts of three complete sessions conducted under laboratory conditions and recorded on video.
Indeed, while I'm no great fan of Michael Hall's books, generally speaking, I have to say that there is far more information, far more useful information and far more relevant information regarding NLP and Brief Therapy in The Sourcebook of Magic, Hall & Belnap (1999) than there is in this sorry effort.
DEFINITELY a book to avoid.

Teach Yourself NLP
Steve Bavister and Amanda Vickers
Hodder Arnold H&S   ISBN 0-3408-1257-5
I would love to have been able to give this book a good review. because some parts of it are very good; because the standard of the writing appears, to me, to be above average for a book on NLP; and because the authors plug my website - twice - in the section taking it further at the back of the book.
But I can't.

In the first place I must confess that I cannot see the need for yet another introduction to NLP unless it stands out in some significant way from all the other introductory books already on the market.  Which Teach Yourself NLP simply doesn't do.
Although the authors have managed to pack a lot into this book, it still doesn't register as a serious competitor to O'Connor and Seymour's Introducing NLP or Joseph O'Connor's solo production, the NLP Workbook.

In the second place, though the quality of the writing in general is of a very satisfactory standard, there are just too many errors of one kind or another.  Which puts this book into the same category as several other introductory texts I've reviewed:  If you know enough to winnow out the errors then you already know as much about NLP as this book has to say.  If you are an NLP novice, on the other hand, I can't see any good reason to recommend a book that is likely to mislead and confuse you.