This book has been reprinted in a new, revised edition, namely The Go Player's Almanac 2001; you probably want to read that page rather than this one.
This is a book of information about go, rather than a book on how to play go. It has historical information about ancient, classical, and modern go, information about modern players, info on tournament go, a list of records, a chapter on equipment, a dictionary of terms, and chapters on computers, mathematical go, and go rules.
I like this book a lot, and if you care about go, you'll probably like it too. In the US, you feel kind of rootless - you don't personally know very many people who play go or who are even more than vaguely aware of its existence, and while you're aware that there are these professionals in Japan, you don't really know much about them, and they have a sort of mythic status. This book will start changing that, by giving you some historical context and telling you some about current players. The Dictionary of Go Terms is also quite useful; I think it's the most extensive such Dictionary that has been published in English.
As Bozulich comments in the introduction, the book does center around Japanese go, and while there are good reasons for that, it's a bit unfortunate right now, since Chinese and Korean professionals are dominating the international go scene. But a book like this can't always be up-to-date, and there's lots of good stuff in it.
The book is hardcover, and the pages are large, about the size of Go World's pages.
Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:52:25 PDT 2003