NLP
Carolyn Boyes
Collins   ISBN 0-00-721655-6
(NB:  "Collins" is, as far as I can make out, actually HarperCollinsCanada)

I would have loved to give this book a high rating.  But in all honesty I can't.  And here's why.

Parts of this book are genuinely equal in quality to some of the books I've already given high ratings on this site.  Unfortunately, however, it is an obvious candidate for the label "curate's egg".  That is to say, along with the good there is far too much that is ambiguous, misleading or just plain inaccurate.
For example, the "chapter" on Beliefs (pages 52-55) makes a lot of sense, until you get to the final section: Changing your beliefs.  At this point the book refers to beliefs as though they were totally rational, so that we are told that all we need to do to change a belief is look at the facts!

I don't know how many clients the author has tried this on, if any, but I'm surprised she hasn't noticed by now that if you tell someone (even yourself) that their belief on some subject is wrong they seldom if ever turn round and thank you for correcting their mistake.
On the contrary, this approach seems like a sure fire way of evoking resistance, since beliefs tend to be based primarily of emotions rather than reason, which usually only comes in a poor second when we are asked to justify a belief.

Or take the chapter Choosing States (pages 46-47) which is good in parts, yet in the section on Interview states offers a technique for creating an appropriate state which looks vaguely like the Circle of Excellence technique, but makes no mention of anchoring the resulting state in any way!

More worrying, though, are the downright innacuracies.  I have no idea of what lies behind them, but it seemed, to me, that someone had culled information from various books on NLP without really understanding what they were reading.  Here are a few examples:

• Going back to beliefs for a moment, the book claims that: "We hold our beliefs inside our heads in the same way as our emotions." (page 147)
  Whilst admitting that I have no idea what point the author is trying to make here it seems to me that the basic assertion, if taken at face value, is patently untrue as far as our current knowledge of the neurological functioning of the brain is concerned.
• The definition of matching and mismatching on page 62 wrongly states that they are to do with noticing sameness or difference,  Yet on page 72 matching and mismatching are defined more or less correctly.
• The "logical levels" model inevitably turns up (page 141ff) with no mention of the fact that it does not consist of genuine levels, that there are no "logical" relationships between the elements, or that it violates certain basic NLP principles.
  Indeed, although the nature of a genuine hierarchy of logical levels is correctly defined, the author claims that the definition applies to this model even though it clearly does not.
• On page 25 we are introduced to the concept of being "at cause" and "at effect" - despite the fact that is is taken straight out of Scientology and has nothing whatever to do with NLP.  Indeed, it actually contradicts the meta model position on "cause and effect", which is described on page 102.
• But maybe the biggest giveaway is on page 115 where we are introduced to not three but four varieties of linguistic ambiguity: Phonological, Syntactic, Scope and Punctuation.
  We might pass this off as simple confusion over the way that "syntactic" and "scope" are used interchangably by different authors BUT for the fact that the descriptions of the two types of ambiguity, which appear one right after the other, are nearly but not quite identical.
  How do you do that?

I don't know how true this is, but I suspect that the bottom line for all of this ambiguity is that the book has been put together on the basis of reading a few books on the subject rather than direct experience.  Because I note that Ms Boyes, whose NLP qualifications are not readily apparent, has written other books for Collins, including,in the same Need to know? series, one on body language, and one entitled Cosmic Ordering in 7 Easy Steps.  Cosmic ordering being a system where you write down what you want and order the Universe to give it to you!  So, NLP expert, or jobbing author?  My inclination is to go for the latter.

To be blunt, although the book is "good in parts", newcomers to NLP deserve something a lot better than this as an introduction to the subject.  And there are several books already on the market which undertake that task far more effectively.
Recommendation:   Ignore this book and help save a tree.

Six Blind Elephants Volume 1
Steve Andreas
Real People Press  ISBN 0-911226-41-9
If size alone was the measure of whether a book was worth its cover price then at 289 pages, plus a four page Introduction, one smallish Appendix, and an Index, this book would rate at least average.
Unfortunately, size alone is not an adequate justification in a book, unless you're planning to use it to prop up an uneven table leg, or as a doorstop.  And in my opinion that makes this book overpriced by maybe 50%.  And oversized by about the same amount

How do I come to that conclusion?  Very easily.
Each of the 13 chapters (which average out at just over 22 pages), has a summary, and thge summaries are seldom if ever longer than two pages, and mostly shorter than that.
And yet -
Those summaries are well-written, useful, genuine summaries such that, in my opinion, a reader could gain a perfectly adequate understanding of the gist of the book even if they read nothing but the summaries.  In other words, if the quality was maintained, the summary pages could be expanded by, say, 600-700 per cent and you'd still have a much shorter book than is actually the case.  And probably one which would appeal to a wider audience.

The problem, I suspect, is that the author is his own publisher, and by the look of what we have in this first volume, that also means that he is his own editor.

In theory that should actually be a benefit, because - in my opinion - it was the books based on Bandler and Grinder seminars, transcribed and edited by Steve and Connirae Andreas (such as Frogs into Princes, TRANCEformations, etc.) which actually facilitated NLP's development from being a small scale group activity based in Santa Cruz to an international phenomenon.
It seems evident, however, that being able to expertly edit other people's work does not necessarily mean that one can bring a similar level of rigor to the editing of one's own work.  On the contrary, this book, like Steve's previous work, Transform Your Self, is packed with material which simply doesn't need to be there.

Some of it is plain extraneous, some of it is personal opinion posing as fact, and some of it seemed, to me, to be just plain daft - not forgetting the characteristic little rant or two about religion.  Here are some brief examples - I leave it to you to decide whether my comments are justified:

"A friend of mine has a dog which was mistreated by a man when it was a puppy, and it is able to distinguish very clearly between men and women. ... Since we can easily distinguish between men and women, this may seem like an easy distinction to make, but most of us find it's not easy to distinguish between a male and a female dog at a small distance."
(page 28)

And ...?  Going on my own experience of observing dogs and women, there do seem to be rather more external, and easily observable, clues which enable us to distinguish between a man and a woman than there are to signal that a dog is male or female.

"If you ask someone to think of all the emotional feelings they have ever experienced, both named and unnamed - anger, sadness, guilt ... etc., and all the nuances of these - most people will start struggling at 30, and be totally exhausted at about 75.  (If you're skeptical, try it.)  Most peoplemake far fewer distinctions than this, and some people have only three: "good," "bad" and "OK."  Compare that with six million for colour alone in the visual modality."
(page 35)

More to the point, the author seems tobe unaware that both emotions and colours are analogue, NOT digital.  That is to say, we can see innumerable "colours" simultaneously, but we do not discriminate between them to the degree that the book implies.  Indeed, how many are distinct colours, and how many are shades, tints, etc. of distinct colours?  And for how many of these "colours" do we have widely recognised names?
If you play with the colour settings on a computer you will quickly find that you can vary the hue, sat and lum values for any given colour to a certain extent without being able to discern any difference at all.  We may be able to physically observe x million "colours," but that is nothing like the same as saying that we can genuinely discriminate between them?

By the same token, pick any pair of emotions you like and it is possible to imagine a continuous spectrum of incredibly minute differences, even though you aren't consciously able to distinguish between them.  The fact that we are seldom if ever aware of the most delicate nuances of our emotions, and don't have a name for each tiny variation doesn't mean they aren't there, as this passage seems to suggest.

"The natural, physical world isn't fair or unfair, it just is."
(page 49)

So if you're dumb enough to believe any concept like "As ye sow, so shall ye reap," Karma, "What goes around, comes around" and so on then snap out of it.  This omniscient (all-knowing) book is right and you're wrong.
And if you think that's an opinion posing as a fact, of course you're wrong again.

"Curiously, even those who follow the values set forth in religious texts would not use those texts as a guide for how to build a television set or an assault rifle.  Those who fight in religious wars are quite willing to use the science embodied in jet planes, radar, and other weaponry to defeat their 'infidel' enemies [who can he mean?] yet they are not willing to use the methods of science to examine the basis for their own beliefs and values."
(page 200)

Perhaps if there were any religious texts that actually included instructions on how to build a TV or an assault rifle, things might be different.  Who knows?

"When searching for a shirt, it usually makes sense to first select only those that are the appropriate size, and then select for the color, style etc. that you prefer."

Say what?

You might be wondering in what sense is the word "usually" being used here.
On further enquiry it turns out that the author is actually thinking of the specific store where he buys HIS shirts, where the garments are all hung out on rails.  So if you happen to buy your own shirts in stores where they are arranged by style and packaged up in cellophane or plastic bags then I'm guessing this would certainly NOT be your own "usual" procedure, and this sentence is yet another very personal opinion posing as a fact?  And again, not very useful opinion?

My major criticism of the book, however, is the subtitle: "Fundamental Principles pf Scope and Category".

I wholly agree that the terms are used in a meaningful way - but to what purpose?
I could find very little in this book that hasn't appeared in print many times before.  The only difference, as far as I could see, was that the words "scope" and "category" instead of the words other authors have used.

Moreover we are promised early on that: "If the first few chapters sometimes seem a bit plodding and irrelevant to understanding life's problems, a little patiernce will be rewarded with a multitude of very useful practical applications.  For a quick taste of these, you can look ahead to chapters 12 and 13 on recategorization, or try the Aggregate Categorical Scope Perspective Exercise on page 175." (page x)

Now chaper 12 doesn't start until page 245, only 44 pages from the end of the main text.  And as I manfully slogged through the intervening pages I have to say it seemed like a hell of a lot more than "a little patience" was required to get through the positively tedious and repetitive contents of those "first few chapters", with very little reward of any description at the end.

So why do I need to be thinking about scopes and categories at all?  After reading this book I have absolutely no idea.  And to show you why I want to go back, for a moment, to that incredibly cumbersomely-named Aggregate Categorical Scope Perspective exercise on page 175 that was recommended as a hot item.

In step 2 of the exercise - Relevant scopes - we are instructed to, "Think of six important scopes that have a bearing on [the decision you need to make in the near future]".  For instance, the likely consequences ..." (page 175).

Maybe it's just me, but I would personally have written that text as, "Think of six important factors that have a bearing ..."  That alternative wording would have had, as far as I can tell, exactly the same meaning, and in language which I suspect is far more widely understood that talk of scopes and categories.

All the way through this book I had the feeling (based, perhaps, on the early promise quoted above) that it was going to advance my understanding to a significant extent.  When I'd finished it all I felt was that most of what I had read was pretty much a complete waste of time.

There is, to be sure, one chapter on logical levels, which the author insists on calling "Categories of Categories" (Chapter 5) which provides a fairly clear explanation of what genuine "logical types" and "logical levels" are, and how the concepts can be usefully applied in NLP.  At the same time, from an academic perspective, the author demolishes the pseudo-logical levels nonsense that has been circulating in NLP circles for some years courtesy of messrs. Dilts and Hall, respectively.  This chapter only accounts for approximately 10 per cent of the book's length (including the introduction), and interesting though it is, in my opinion it doesn't warrant paying the price of the entire book unless that happens to be a subject that you find particularly interesting.

Overall, this read, to me, like the kind of book that a particular kind of person praises for no better reason than that it seems so obtuse.  The logic being, it seems, that if the reader, who rates his own intellectual prowess pretty highly, can't understand the book then it must be very profound indeed.  (The words "clothes," "new" and "emperor" come to mind.)
If I could read the author's mind, everything on this book might make perfect sense.  Unfortunately, however, I do not have access to the author's brain - only the excerpts of his thinking which appear on the pages of this book - and a few questions I've been able to ask him online.  Fom that limited perspective I give this a one star rating, and even that is based entirely on the contents of Chapter 5:   *.

Please note:   The above comments ONLY apply to Six Blind Elephants Vol. 1.  A separate review will be presented for Volume 2, and at the moment I have no idea whether the second volume will be better, worse or about the same.

Brilliant NLP
David Molden and Pat Hutchinson
Prentice Hall Business ISBN 0-273-70789-2
Just to get any possible misunderstanding out of the way, the appearance of the word "brilliant" in the title of this book is a link into a series of business books issued under the slogan: "Don't be Good.  Be Brilliant with ..."  Which is a bit of a shame, because this particular book is unlikely to help the reader become brilliant with anything, let alone "Brilliant with NLP."

Anyway, to the book itself.
Like so many of the books I've reviewed lately there's good news and bad news; so let's start with the good news.
The good news is that the book is well laid out, well written and therefore very easy to read.  It also shows some degree of creativity often absent from recent introductions to NLP, such as the inclusion of a section on the Satir Categories including "leveller."  A very welcome and useful variation.
(I realise that the Satir categories aren't usually included in core NLP, but Satir was certainly one of the core influences in the development of NLP, and her use of the categories must surely have been witnessed, many times by both Bandler and Grinder and therefore presumably influenced their thinking to a significant extent?)

Unfortunately, that is the end of the good news.  And there's more bad news than there is good news.

Firstly, the cover price of £12.99 for a book of only 113 pages (and no references, bibliography or index) is, in my opinion, way over the top.  Even if the book delivered on its promise I think it would be hard to justify a price of more than £8.99-£9.99.
Of course I realize that both the authors and the publisher no doubt believe that the book does give a good value for money, but I personally found no justification for such an opinion.  Which brings us to the other reasons why I've given the book such a low rating.

1. Missing information - since eight of the ten chapters end with a totally blank page (so that the next chapter can start on an odd numbered page), there was plenty of room to add a few additional words of explanation on some of the techniques.  In Chapter 10, for example, the perceptual positions technique is described, fairly succinctly, but with no mention whatever of the crucial problem many people (almost everyone, according to research by Connirae Andreas) have with the need to avoid leakage of "feelings, thoughts, voices, etc." between the three positions (see Six Blind Elephants, Vol. 1, pages 156-157 (reviewed above)).  Even quite a short extra paragraph detailing this problem could have radically improved the description.
    
   
2. Inconsistency - such as the description of the NLP presupposition "Mind and body are part [sic] of the same system" (pages 100-101).  The text describes how the way someone thinks can affect their physiology, but says nothing about how a person's physiology can affect their thinking.
    
   Or again:
    
   In the section on well-formed outcomes, despite the specification that an outcome should depend as little as possible on other people's input (page 91), the example of someone planning and realising an outcome (page 93) is almost completely dependent on other people's co-operation and contains not a hint of a "Plan B" should that co-operation not be forthcoming for any reason.
    
   
3. Factual inaccuracies - "You have one brain but two minds - one conscious and the other unconscious" (p.xii).  In the first place it is by no means certain that the mind (singular) is separate from the brain.  And whether it is or it isn't, as presented here this presupposition actually refers to the brain and the body, not the mind and the body.  That is to say, there have been numerous studies which demonstrate the existence of the subconscious and conscious brain, but none (as far as I know), showing that anything that might be called the mind exists as two - conscious and unconscious - entities.
   On the contrary, following Milton Erickson's lead, the NLP-related definitions of conscious and unconscious are the activities of our brain that we are aware of (consciousness) and the rest, which are outside of our consciousness at any time (the "unconscious" brain).  There is in one sense a complete overlap between the two, since we can shift the focus of our conscious attention to almost any of our physical and mental functions.  So almost any area of the brain can be conscious sometimes, and unconscious at other times.  I think the authors actually do recognise these facts, but unless one already has this knowledge I think there is considerable ambiguity in the statement that: "This storage area [of your unconscious mind] is much larger than the conscious mind you are using to read this book right now" (p.xii).
    
   Or again:
    
   "A memory consists of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic elements, and sometimes includes smells and tastes."  A memory without the corresponding tastes and smells?  How would that be possible (assuming that the person doing the remembering has working senses of smell and taste)?
    
   And of course Mehrabian's 7%-38%-55% research turns up - and as is so often the case there isn't the slightest indication that the figures only apply in certain circumstance.
    
   
4. Exaggerated claims - "You will discover what really makes you tick, and begin to make crystal clear decisions about what you want from work and life" (p.xiii).
   Only at the very end of the book is this balanced off by the acknowledgement that: "NLP is a skill [sic] that requires practice and your journey through this book is the first step towards a better life" (p.113)
    
   Or:
    
   "You can achieve anything you decide" (page 100)
    
   Oh really?  How about the US staff officer who thinks he can walk through walls if only he can get the speed just right (yes, this character really exists)?
    
   Or again:
    
   "Success requires congruence and this means an alignment of all the levels from purpose down through to the behaviour.  Only then can you affect your environment in the way you really want" (page 50).  So no one ever "succeeded" unless they were 100 per cent congruent?
   Pull the other one - it has a concert orchestra on it!
    
5. Distortions - such as the introduction to meta programs (consistently misspelt as "metaprogrammes) on page 6:
    
   "So far we have looked at the values you have accumulated as a result of your life experiences.  Underlying these are some deeper-rooted values which determine the way you approach life.  They are called metaprogrammes [sic] - the source of your core motivation and behaviour patterns."
   (page 6)
    
   Inaccurate in every respect!  Meta programs are filters used to sort and process sensory information.  They are context specific, though some may be similar across several contexts.  They may well be dictated by your values, but they are not themselves values, deep-rooted or otherwise.  And it is how you think about life that determines what meta programs you apply in a given context, and how, not the other way round.
    
   Or again:
    
   In the section in Chapter 3 on reframing (pages 40-42).  The book presents the reframing process as though it is the therapist's responsibility to invent the reframe and impose it on the client whereas it practice the role of the therapist is to help facilitate the client as they discover a relevant and meaningful reframe for themself.
    
   
6. Basic errors - talking of distortions, in Chapter 6 (The impact of words), the book describes generalization, deletion and distortion as though they were three separate processes (pages 75-77), instead of explaining that deletion and distortion are the processes used (by removing differentiating characteristics) to create generalization
    
   Or again:
    
   One might assume that people who regularly use NLP in their work could spot an erroneous illustration of an eye accessing cue almost without thinking, yet in this book there are four such errors.
   On page 67 the eye positions for visual recall (eyes up and right), and visual construct (eyes up and left) are shown correctly.  However, the eye positions for auditory recall and auditory construct (page 68), internal dialogue {page 69) and kinaesthetic (page 70) are all shown the wrong way round (given that they are supposedly "valid for a right-handed person" - page 67).

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the book's shortcomings, but it is enough, I think, to show that the book is completely "unfit for purpose".  The point is not that the book is flawed in every respect, because it isn't.  But it is intended as an introductory text, yet if the reader is to avoid the numerous errors they would need to already possess a good working knowledge of NLP.  And if they already had that knowledge, why would they need this book?
Recommendation:   Avoid this book and save a tree.