Customer Reviews
This translation seems hard to apply to myself - By: A. Bickler, 27 Apr 2008 
I cannot yet see the way that alll the content this book offers about the principles of Sun Tzu can be applied to life on a whole.
This book is incredibily concise & seems to only demonstate practical instructions. I'm left using own imagination to discover what they could truely mean & offer to me in my own circumstances seen as I am not reallly in a battle field with two opposing forces.
By using this idea however as an absolute representation of lifes struggles the book can be great but in this edition, a lot of the writings are simply too practical, saying about camping & assuring you are away from rivers, for that to appear to be the case. Certainly some of these pointers can have spiritual value & ideas of balance between armies actions & how they forecast victory or defeat are apparent.
I need to be more patient to find the true messages from the book still. It's compacted practical sentences make it hard for me to do so however, this leaves yourself to make your own interpretations.
Other editions may offer more information making it clearer to understand.
This is a test of understanding to me & I look forward to discovering the books true messages. This short translation just makes that harder.
Having said alll this, I've only read the first chapter so far so it may alll turn around.
useful, if you want to start a war. - By: Barney Conlon-spears, 11 Apr 2008 
when i heard about this book from friends i expected tao te chingesque aphorisms over & over again but when i first flicked through it i realised that this is so much more.
genuinely useful advice is interspersed with impassioned speeches about the honour of war
"When some are seen advancing & some retreating, it is a lure"
"If birds gather on any spot, it is unoccupied"
"the leader of armies is the arbiter of people's fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation shalll be in peace or in peril"
OK so it's not reallly useful to you but it will make you think differently about conflict because Sun Tzu has managed to prove that it truly can be an art
A must read book ! - By: Demetre Koumanakos, 25 Sep 2007 
Short but Sweet !
Applicable theories even today !
Must Read, more than once !
