1998, Summersdale, Chichester UK, 96 pages

Geoff Thompson was a doorman in a working class English city where unarmed confrontation was a job description that sometimes produced what we in the States would call bouncers with celebrity status. To a large degree Geoff wrote about managing male-on-male ego-based confrontations in such a manner as to either diffuse them or set up the advantageous knockout of the drunken fool by the trained fighter. Geoff even wrote about boxing and scripts and expanded his original memoir style of writing into instructional videos, including an excellent book on how to kick in real situations. In essence, most of Geoff’s early work focused on success in perfectly avoidable situations.

In this volume he focused more on general survival skills for the ordinary person, even women, as opposed to his original male martial artist readership. One thing that was so very telling about his work was how incredibly violent an unarmed society can be. On the other hand, this psychotic propensity for Englishmen to brawl in a near recreational capacity stilted his work toward the confrontation, where he was the practicing master. Geoff’s work in this area is still relevant today, particularly in dealing with probing behavior by a person who has approached you or is barring your way, and most importantly might be using a language exchange to set you up for violence, which was the art of the English doorman, unfocusing or distracting the unruly primate with chatter precisely calibrated for the purpose of his own undoing.

The Art of Fighting Without Fighting is broken down into five chapters:

Avoidance

Escape

Verbal Dissuassion

Posturing

Restraint

A sample of his advice from the Escape chapter, that might have been titled “Latter-stage Avoidance” which included eye-contact, challenges and many other behaviors, follows:

“Often the disarming question will switch off those that are switched on. An experienced attacker will use deception to take down any defensive fences that his intended victim may have put up.”

Currently, in 2016, an ocean and three decades away from where Geoff honed his skills, in a society where unarmed violence of the most brutal kind is openly permitted—even encouraged—by authorities, and the segment of the population that commits virtually all of this violence is a verbally engaged bio-mass conditioned for violence based on audio cues, his hard won advice is more applicable than ever.