An Introduction of Korean Badook, by Yong Kwan Ju. Korean Badook Association U.S.A; 2000.

This is an introductory book. At least I think it's supposed to be an introductory book, but it would be laughably bad if used as such. It gives a set of "rules" for the game which don't tell you how to capture stones (they jump straight from saying that black and white take turns and that stones aren't moved to forbidding suicide and immediate recapture of a ko). It gives essentially no systematic guidance as to how to play beyond the rules, no way for a beginner to figure out how to play or see what a game is like. Honestly, if you ever see this book in close proximity to a beginner, tell the beginner to run away screaming.

What else? It's a bilingual book in Korean and English. As you might guess from the title, the quality of the writing in English is less than stellar. It's very colorful, though: the diagrams have full-colour go boards, and each page has text in black, blue, red, and green. The last 3/4 of the book is spent going through go terminology; this could potentially be of some benefit as a Korean-English dictionary of go terms, I suppose. But that's the only way in which this book could be useful at all.

There's an uninformative web page for the book; if you feel compelled to buy a copy for some strange reason, then you can get a copy via Slate & Shell.


david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:55:54 PDT 2003