I don't recommended this book very much. The first two chapters don't seem to me to be meaty enough to be really useful, and the listing of the kinds of kos is information that is easy to find elsewhere (and be warned: what other books (e.g. Davies' Tesuji)) call two-step kos and two-stage kos this book calls two-move approach kos and two-step kos respectively). The chapter containing 40 typical examples is good; if you're the kind of person who really digs reading life and death books, then you'll probably like that chapter. (I expect that some of the information in there is duplicated in life and death books, but I could be wrong.) I don't have much of an opinion on the last two chapters; I didn't work through the problems myself.
Of course, this is the only book that deals only with ko available in English, so if you're really curious about ko, this is where to go. But it doesn't contain that much information that you can't find in other books, so I wouldn't recommend it to most people.
Click here to see Yutopian's blurb about the book.
Last modified: Sun Aug 10 21:00:23 PDT 2003