This is a book about killing groups, or preventing your groups from being killed. It mostly consists of examples from games, but there are also sections on killing techniques and on preventative measures.
It's a fun book, but I don't know how much it will actually improve your game. It's neat to see group after group dying, but I think that the ratio of examples from games to theory is too high for the book to be really helpful, and I think that a book on the middle game more generally would be more helpful still. But it does have good aspects, and in particular the Go v. Sakata game is quite nice - the commentary runs for 36 pages, and there's often only about five moves on a page, giving him time to go over each move in detail, considering the sorts of moves that amateurs play all the time but that professionals automatically reject and don't normally even bother mentioning in commentaries. And I did enjoy reading it.
Click here to see Yutopian's blurb about the book.
Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:59:34 PDT 2003