Kiseido's first published book in the new "Mastering the Basics" is a book of life and death problems, consisting of 1001 life and death problems, primarily taken from the Nihon-Kiin's book"1,2,3 de Tokeru Tsume-go 1000 Dai".

The book is divided into three sections, the first containing 400 "one-move problems" evenly split between black to play and black to kill. The second and third sections are 300 three- move problems and 301 five-move problems, again split evenly between black to play and black to kill, with the extra (1001st) problem being a five-move black to kill problem. Problems range in difficulty from simple nakade shapes to moderately difficult shapes. The book is laid out like the "Get Strong At Tesuji", with the odd pages containing 8 or 9 life and death problems and the overleaf even-number page containing the correct answers. Refutations of incorrect answers are generally not given and figuring out the refutation of your incorrect answers can be good exercise all by itself.

I'm really enjoying this book. Life-and-death, reading, and concentration are areas I've been trying to improve lately, and this book seems to be helping. The problems are mixed up nicely, with easier and more challenging problems scattered throughout. Even some of the one- move problems can be relatively challenging. While the correct answer is indeed one move with a relatively simple continuation, the challenge can come in seeing the 5-move sequence that refutes the incorrect answer which leapt to mind.

The book is most useful for low-kyu and dan level players who want more practice with life- and-death and reading, for example after having completed at least the first three of the Graded Go Problems for Beginners series. For less experienced players, the graded Go problem books would probably be a better time investment, though this book would still be useful.

This is, of course, 1001 life-and-death problems, almost all taken from 1, 2, 3 de Tokeru Tsume-go 1000 Dai. There are 400 one-move problems, 300 three-move problems, and 301 five-move problems. There are eight or nine problems on a page, and each problem only gets a single solution diagram.

This is an excellent book. I love the difficulty level of the problems: I'm an AGA 1k who's decent at life-and-death, and I never either got overwhelmed by the difficulty of the problems or bored by their easiness. I went through the book quite smoothly, going through each page fairly quickly, yet finding a few problems on each page that made me think for a bit even in the earliest problems. The problems, of course, got more difficult as I went from one-move problems to three-move problems to five-move problems, and by the end of the book I was doing the problems (and checking my solutions) in groups of 3 rather than groups of 9, but the difficulty never got to be too much for me. (Incidentally, I found the problems of the form "Black to live in n moves" to be more difficult than the problems of the form "Black to kill in n moves" for a given value of n; if I'm not the only one who feels that way, then perhaps it would be better to read the problems to kill before reading the problems to live, despite their order in the book.)

Problems with similar themes often occurred together. (Which sometimes meant that a few pages of the book were particularly difficult for me, if the theme was one that I had trouble with; in all such cases, though, once I persevered problems got easier again.) But there were never enough problems in a row with a given theme to bore me: just as I started to notice a theme in a few problems, it disappeared.

This book is a testimony to how wonderful a game go is. It consists of a thousand and one life and death problems within a fairly narrow difficulty range; you'd think that there wouldn't be enough variety of problems available to fill a book like that, or at the very least that doing that many problems would get dull or overwhelming. But it isn't: I very rarely had to push myself to keep on reading the book, and every time I did I was glad.

I suspect that this would be good reading for anybody who is a single-digit kyu or stronger; though people at the weak end of that range would find the problems challenging enough that they probably wouldn't have the stamina to make it through a whole lot of the book. Heck, a lot of people wouldn't have the stamina to make it through the whole thing: a thousand-and-one problems is a lot, no matter what. But it's all good stuff. If you liked Get Strong at Tesuji, give it a try.