 Dylan Schumacher with Sadel Defense and today is another episode of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is Left of Bang by Patrick Von Horn and Jason A. Reilly. I read this book about two to three years ago, came out in 2014. And since then I've noticed the language from the book kind of seeping into different trainers that I've visited and that I kind of watch and follow and I think it's a helpful book overall. The entire concept of the book is being left of bang. So I guess this would be your left, right? Bang in this, maybe this is your left? I don't know. Anyways, so the bang is the event, right? It's the bomb going off, it's the car bomb going off, it's the guy starting the robbery, it's someone pulling out the gun and starting a mass shooting. That's the bang, the event. And the whole idea is if you look at a timeline, right, you want to be to the left of that timeline, right? Because we read left to right in this culture. So the idea is to be before, to understand what comes before the event so that you're being able to, you're able to be proactive and not reactive, versus being right of bang where it's happened and now you have to react and respond, right? So the whole idea is to be able to see things coming. And it sounds really cool and concept and we'd all like to be a little bit ahead of the power curve, right? However, I found most of the stuff in this book to be, I don't want to say common sense, but I think things that we would all kind of read that and be like, oh yeah, like more affirming than like new knowledge. I don't feel like there's a lot in this book that I read that I'm like, wow, that just like changes the game. But it did give a lot of technical language to ways to understand how things happen before they happen. So that was helpful because I'm a big believer in categories. I'm a big believer in having buckets of understanding and knowledge and learning that you can drop things into so that you can retrieve that information better. So this book is very good at that. I think it gives you those categories for understanding what can happen before. For example, they use the term baseline, right? Now maybe you've heard that term, maybe you haven't, but baseline is basically establishingly normal. So if every day when you go into Starbucks, there's 10 people in there and they're online. Bob Bills and Susie and Jane and they're always there at 8.02 am or whatever to get their coffee and you walk in one day and all of a sudden everybody's spread out and they're not in line like they usually are and they're not looking at their phones like they usually are and instead they're looking at this guy over in the corner. Well your baseline is off, right? Like you know, okay, there's an anomaly here, something's weird, something's going off. Now naturally if you walked into that coffee shop without knowing any of this, you would still know something's off, right? I mean, unless you're just totally absorbed in your own world and not paying attention at all, you would still know something's off, but this book gives language to codify that and to be able to better drop those things into buckets of knowledge, like I said, in categories, which I think is helpful. So it's a short book. It's not big. I think it's like 160 pages, 200 pages. Not big, not a big book. So it's a quick read. It's an easy read. I think it's worth having in your library to read through and just kind of let it wash over you. I don't think it's anything that you necessarily need to study intensely. I think it'd be particularly helpful for police officers or people who might be involved in use of force incidents more often, particularly when being able to describe those events later, be it in court or in a report or whatever. This book will help give you the language to be able to explain what it was you saw and why you reacted the way you did. And so for that, I definitely think it would be helpful. For your average everyday civilian, you might find it interesting. You might not. I don't know. I don't feel like I can just tell you absolutely need to read this book. There are books like that, but I don't know if this is one. So that's left of bang. I think it's worth the read if that at all piques any of your interest or if that intrigues any of you all. If none of that piques your interest, you want to skip it. I don't think you're going to lose too much. Dylan Chumacher, Citadel Defense, do brave deeds and endure.