The good:  There's a lot of good information about lean manufacturing tools in this book.
The not-so-good:  Unless you already know how to implement lean manufacturing at some level, you won't learn it from this book.

This book is really something of an advanced text.  The title will draw lots of folks (I'm guessing) who are looking for a step-by-step, week-by-week guide to implementing lean.  When they're finished with the book (assuming they stick with it, and they should), they'll still be wondering, "But how do I get started?"   Right up front, the author says, "This book has a 'how to' perspective."  And that's true.  Sort of.  But it's not so much "how to" as it is "how these things work".  And that can be useful, too.

It's true in that the book is very "methods and tools" oriented, especially if the methods and tools you're interested in are figuring takt times and balancing lines.  I don't mean this as a criticism at all.  I've never seen a good explanation of takt time and line balancing, never mind any good illustrations or examples.  This book has both.  And it's true that the book is willing to get "down in the weeds" with the tools and methods it does cover, not just simply describing them quickly and telling us that we ought to use them.  And it's also true that the author avoids all the general, philosophical talk about lean that fills many articles and books.  But, again, it's not very 'how to' as in 'how to implement lean manufacturing assuming you don't know much about it and are having trouble figuring out what to do and how to get started". 

The author has a good writing style.  You get the feeling that you're having a conversation with someone who has seen and experienced a lot in his career and is willing to share it.  He does a very good job of using examples and includes a number of detailed case studies to illustrate his lessons.  (In fact, were it not for the cases and examples, I would have had a much harder time with the material.) 

He does a good job of organizing his material...to a point.  Again, it doesn't have a good "start to finish" flow (we don't get to "How to Implement Lean - The Prescription for the Lean Project" until Chapter Eight!) but each topic and chapter is well structured.  I got the feeling he's taught all this material before and is practiced at laying it out in a logical, reasonably easy to follow manner.  Sometimes, the material is a bit too well structured: the chapter "Lean Manufacturing Simplified" is really just a glossary of terms.  Not a bad thing, obviously, but when your glossary includes statements like, "Takt is the design process cycle time to match the customer's demand, normalized to your production schedule," I don't think you can claim that you've "simplified lean" for many people.  Like most authors, he uses his share of jargon and Japanese terms for which there are perfectly good and descriptive English words but, unlike some authors, he doesn't overdo it. 

I think the author began to run out of steam as he got to some of  the later chapters.  The chapter on planning isn't much help and in " Sustaining the Gains" (Chapter Ten) he says, "Human elements are often the greatest source of variation," but then, three pages later, states, "...the major opportunity for improvement...lies not in improving the people, rather...in improving the systems."  But if the human elements are the greatest source of variation wouldn't that be our major opportunity for improvement?  I'd recommend reading the first chapters, then skip to the case studies that start with Chapter Fourteen. 

The author speaks to the importance of good problem solving; in fact, it's a pillar of his "lean readiness assessment".  Other than recommending the Kepner-Tregoe method, though, he doesn't offer much in the way of good problem solving tools.  The author doesn't say much about the need for operational excellence as a foundation to implementing the tools he focuses on other than references to OEE and equipment capabilities in the cases he describes.  In my own experience, it does no good to introduce advanced methods until you can be sure, for example,  that the tooling will run parts the first time it's put in.  I know that the author knows and believes this but we don't see much at all about 5S, quick change, TPM or standard work instructions or how to implement them.  Finally, as good as the cases are for illustrating the methods the author covers, one gets the impression that lean is best implemented by a consultant with a good stopwatch and a trusty calculator.  There were a few times that the author showed how he (not the client) figured out how to get things done with some fancy looking calculations, that left me thinking, "Wouldn't one have seen that was the case just by looking?  Or, at most, by asking the operators a few questions?"  My point is that the authors cases, useful as they are for illustrating the methods he covers, gives the impression that lean is more "expert-oriented" and difficult than it really is.

All that said, I recommend the book, especially if you already know a bit about lean and especially if most of your work is in environments where line balancing is going to be useful, e.g., assembled products or products requiring a number of steps to completion.  Just don't expect to read it this weekend and start implementing your lean initiative next Monday.