When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake

by Tim Larkin

Overview

This book could save your life: Protect yourself from violence and learn survival skills for dangerous situations with this essential guide from a former military intelligence officer.

In a civilized society, violence is rarely the answer. But when it is, it's the only answer. The sound of breaking glass downstairs in the middle of the night. The words, "Move and you die." The hands on your child, or the knife to your throat.

In this essential book, self-protection expert and former military intelligence officer Tim Larkin changes the way we think about violence in order to save our lives. By deconstructing our assumptions about violence — its morality, its function in modern society, how it actually works — Larkin unlocks the shackles of our own taboos and arms us with what we need to know to prevent, prepare for, and survive the unthinkable event of life-or-death violence.

Through a series of harrowing true-life stories, Larkin demonstrates that violence is a tool equally effective in the hands of the "bad guy" or the "good guy"; that the person who acts first, fastest and with the full force of their body is the one who survives; and that each and every one of us is capable of being that person when our lives are at stake.

An indispensable resource, When Violence is the Answer will remain with you long after you've finished reading, as the bedrock of your self-protection skills and knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316354653
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	93,499
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Tim Larkin is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of violence. As a former military intelligence officer, he was part of a beta group that redesigned how Special Operations personnel trained for close combat.

Over the course of his 25-year career, through his company Target Focus Training (TFT), he has trained more than 10,000 people in more than 50 countries how to deal with imminent violence, including elite combat units, celebrities and high-status executives, law enforcement agencies, and high-net worth families. Larkin is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book Survive The Unthinkable. He lives in Las Vegas, NV.

Table of Contents

Introduction: In the Beginning 3

Part 1 How To Think About Violence

Chapter 1 Violence Is a Tool 19

Chapter 2 Social Aggression Versus Asocial Violence 41

Chapter 3 Mindset Matters Most 63

Chapter 4 The Worst People Have the Best Information 85

Chapter 5 When Violence Isn't the Answer 107

Part 2 How To Think About Using Violence

Chapter 6 The Best Target Is the One You Can Get 143

Chapter 7 Your Brain Is Your Deadliest Weapon 175

Chapter 8 Training Time 195

Chapter 9 Training to Inflict Injury 223

Chapter 10 In the End 273

Acknowledgments 281

Index 285

Editorial Reviews

Praise for When Violence is the Answer

"Larkin condenses twenty-five years of study and experience into a highly engaging book. Read it, study it, give it to people you love."—Gavin de Becker, bestselling author, The Gift of Fear

"I love books that challenge conventional wisdom. This book makes us confront issues most of us do our best to ignore. Tim Larkin has written a necessary and important book that gives a good hard look at topics - violence, chaos, fighting - that most people don't want to think about. You should read it - and then you should give it out as a gift to the people you care most about because this book could very well save their lives."—Tony Robbins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Unshakeable and Money: Master the Game

"Excellent! In every way-from the opening, to the conclusion, to all the solid lifesaving, life-changing information in between-this book is solid gold."—Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, author of On Killing and Assassination Generation

"Tim Larkin is one of the most insightful violence and self-defense instructors I've ever known, and When Violence Is The Answer is a distillation and expansion of his quarter century's work in the field. As a thriller writer, I can promise you won't be able to put this book down, and as someone who has taken Tim's courses and used his teachings to make himself and his family safer in the world, I can promise this book will do the same for you."—Barry Eisler, New York Times bestselling author

"Tim Larkin has lived his life in the dark places that many people don't care to go. He's trained people to survive life and death situations. He's worked with the very tip of the spear of our military, including units whose missions will never see the light of day. That's why he's a perfect guide for the rest of us on how to handle, think about, and respond to violence.This is a brilliant and necessary book, and I can't recommend it strongly enough."—Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fireand The War of Art

"A timely survival manual for life in a strange era.... Just the attitude to adopt... Larkin provides some useful nuggets for these fraught times."—Kirkus

From the Publisher

05/01/2017
Larkin is schooled in violence, though not in committing it. As a self-defense expert with a 1.6 million-plus-subscriber email list, he trains celebrities, soldiers, and just plain folks to respond effectively to physical threat. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2017-07-03
"That one time when violence is the answer, make no mistake, it will be the only answer"—a timely survival manual for life in a strange era.Violence is always the last resort. That said, given a time of slashers on city buses, shooters in the streets, and a politics of division and hatred, to say nothing of the usual mashers and bullies, it's useful to know how to take down a threat. The necessary precondition, writes security expert and former military intelligence officer Larkin (Survive the Unthinkable: A Total Guide to Women's Self-Protection, 2013), is what might be called situational awareness. "Listening to music full blast and staring into the abyss of our never-ending Facebook news feed effectively makes us deaf and blind," he writes, and eminently vulnerable to the predators among us. While noting continually that violence moves any argument onto ground that you can no longer control, the author allows that there are times when the only response is just that; in any violent encounter, he urges, "the real edge goes to the person with the willingness and the training to get the job done." His book amounts to a kind of notional manual geared more toward reconciliation with the fact that it's an ugly world in which "asocial violence" is rampant rather than a practical guide to pressure points and guaranteed knockout punches—though there certainly are mentions of such things. As the narrative draws to a close, we find Larkin celebrating, more than once, the satisfaction that comes from rhythmic smacking and hearing the crunch of an enemy's bone, all thanks to the fact that readers, now convinced that the world is indeed an arena of Darwinian struggle, have become "explosively efficient." Atavistically so, one might say, but given that the headlines would seem to bear Larkin out, it might be just the attitude to adopt. The repetition may be maddening, drilled into readers like a kata, but Larkin provides some useful nuggets for these fraught times. And remember: violence is always the last resort—even if you're a ninja.

Kirkus Reviews