Well, I read the book all the way through over the weekend. The book did not have a heavy amount of content, as most of the pages contain several large color photograps. Take away the pictures and this is a 100 page or less book. Needless to say, just to go from cover to cover, it is a quick read.
He had an historical section about the origin and developement of the 'Samurai sword.' Not an historian, but nothing seemed radically good or bad. A budo historian could evaluate it more authoritatively than I can. It was fairly short; just a few pages. This book has a good sized font, incidenally.
The author is up front that Fukasa Ryu is not an historic ryu, but one that he has created, and he makes no claims of lineage. This is both good and bad; good in that he's being honest. Bad in that he says that his book deals with Fukasa Ryu, a modern Iaito art, and "Kenjutsu, one of the oldest extant kobujutsu." He may have stated and I merely missed it, but I don't recall him stating what ryu of Kenjutsu that the material was drawn from.
His section on dojo etiquette and wearing of the keikogi and hakama was about a quarter of the book. Nothing seemed out of place except that he had the students come in with the keikogi on with shorts, carrying their hakama. The students did some warmups and then put the hakama on. Is this normal practice in an iaito dojo? I've never heard of anyone doing this, but maybe its normal in iai? He also wears the obi partially outside of the hakama. I've seen this done at some of the Korean kumdo schools, and never having been to an iai school, I considered this a cosmitic issue and nothing more. I recall a demo by the Capital Area Budokai, and they wore an obi inside of the hakama, so you could only see it on the sides where the hakama is open. Nemeroff wears it inside through the back, with it coming outside on the sides and tied in the front. Seems like more of a stylistic thing.
He had almost another quarter of the book taken up with sword preparation and description of the sword and its parts, all of which was familiar to me and seemed in place.
The rest was kenjutsu techniques and iaito kata. I did not painstakingly analyze the iaito; I am not an iaito practitioner, so I have no basis to determine the authenticity of what he is doing, either the authenticity of the kata he lists or his execution of said kata. It was at this point that I put in the DVD.
His sword work looked okay, but not what I'd expect from a multi art tenth dan master and Soke of the style, particularly one that doesn't look much older than myself (42 in March), and thus not limited physically, but he didn't look horrible either.
I did find the ukemi to be cool, more in that he does it (we don't touch on rolls and falls in kendo) and he rolls pretty well. Aside from doing it with a sword, its the same set of rolls and falls that I do in hapkido.
The only real red flag that I saw in the book (overtitling of the author aside) is that it is marketed somewhat as a self study program. To his credit, he doesn't offer rank with the completion of the book and DVD, and he doesn't get into cutting actual targets, but rather does everything with (presumably) a forms blade that is unedged. I'm not keen on self study of martial arts for beginners. Beginners need a guiding hand much more so than an advanced practitioner in order to keep from developing bad habits.
That is what I found in the book.
Daniel