Finished the book over the holiday weekend. Get past the flowery prose and there's nothing earth-shattering there, the workflow is pretty standard. I suppose his use of the history brush for dodging and burning is novel, but no more effective than other techniques (and I would argue it's less effective than some). If you're looking for any ground-breaking revelations, you won't find them unless he sells you on PercepTool. What's frustrating is that the book promises so much, and has these dramatic before/after examples in the 'Featured Artist' sections but there's really no information provided on how they achieved those results.
I downloaded the PercepTool demo now that it's available for Windows. All it does is reduce global contrast while increasing local contrast. It works very very slowly, so much so that I think I could fire up Lightzone and make my own manual adjustments more quickly than letting the plug-in run. I suppose for some images it might work OK, but for most images I tried there were problem areas, which is pretty much what I've come to expect from 'magic button' post-processing tools. Definitely not worth the $89 asking price, especially considering that it took just under 10 minutes to run on a 40 megapixel stitched shot (on a Core2Quad machine with 8GB of RAM and fast hard disks).