Good ideas, suspicious motives
Customer Rating: 
The emphasis of this book is on "new sports and fitness", which is defined by the author as being non-competitive, safe, and inclusive of all players. This kind of sports and fitness is an excellent approach for young children. This book offers many ways to help teach kids new and fun ways to exercise and work together collaboratively. Apart from sports, other areas touched upon include yoga, t'ai chi, and meditations on self-acceptance.
While there are many good ideas given here, practice may not be as simple as shown. I strongly encourage that children get parental or teacher guidance when performing some of the activities in this book. I can remember being about 10 years old and trying some of the yoga activities described in this book unsupervised. I strained my neck very badly during one of the stretches.
Over and over in this book is the advocacy of non-competitiveness, and it is this element which makes the book distinctive in comparison to others. However, this emphasis is so strong (making a point to denigrate commercial competitive sports) that I soon became suspicious of the author's motives. On pages 96 and 97 is a glowing article on "Chairman Mao's Exercise Program". In it, Tom Schneider praises the program and how cooperative all of the participants are. Another article on page 124 describing the New Games Festival expresses a hope that New Games will someday replace military games as performed by the U.S. Armed Forces. All of this leaves me wondering how much Schneider wrote this book to teach exercise, and how much he wrote this book as a way to covertly spread Socialist propaganda to children.
