As the back of this little book says, Maeda was known as "the god of life and death Go problems". These problems, like many of Slate & Shell's offerings, were originally published in Go Review, the first serious Go magazine in English. It's good to have them widely available again.

The book follows the format of the magazine articles, which is both a strength and a weakness. Each of the magazine articles presented ten life and death problems of increasing difficulty. In a magazine, this allowed most players to cruise through the problems until they reached their level. And indeed, a wide range of readers would find challenging problems in the book. There is a problem in simply reproducing these cycles of ten, though. A reader might quickly run through the start of each cycle, but then become stuck on a hard problem. Repeating this cycle eleven times, for the 110 problems here, could become frustrating.

The problems in each cycle cover a reasonable range of difficulty. I'm an AGA 1 kyu who enjoys life and death problems. The first five or so in each set seemed very easy to me, often being obvious; but, by the last one or two, I had to think longer than would have been reasonable in a game. The book claims a range from about 7 kyu to 2 dan, which doesn't seem far off except for the very easiest problems.

Physically, the soft-cover book is small and perfect-bound. It is well edited. I only found two noticeable mistakes: Problem 19 should say White, not Black, to play and kill, but few would be confused; Problem 41 more seriously omits the edge of the board on the right hand side, which may confuse some. The book is small enough to be carried in my briefcase or a large pocket, providing a source of short problems to read in my odd free minutes. While certainly not my favorite life and death book, I will reread it several times.

This is a collection of life and death problems. It is not a translation of one of the small Japanese Maeda volumes that are fairly widely available in the US: rather, it's a collection of 110 problems from Go Review. It's a small book, and fits in the pocket of my jeans.

The problems were apparently originally published in groups of 10, with each group ranging in difficulty from 7 kyu to 2 dan. (There aren't difficulty levels given on the individual problems, but that's what the back cover gives as the range.) And, unlike the Japanese volumes, these difficulty ratings seem to me to be quite accurate. I'm an AGA 1 kyu; I found the first problems in each group to typically be rather easy, but they quickly got to an interesting level, and even the final problems in the group weren't so difficult as to annoy me. I must say, also, that this method of arranging problems in a non-monotonic order worked better for me than books that arrange problems from easiest to hardest throughout the entire book. For example, when I last read the first volume of the Japanese Maeda problems, I went through the first third or so quite quickly, then in the next third I enjoyed the problems most of the time, but then for the last third I ran into page after page containing multiple frustrating problems. So I ended up only really liking about a third of that book. This book's method of organization worked much better for me, however: I never was bored or frustrated for too long at a stretch.

I wouldn't recommend it for people at the top end of the range: I suspect that a 7 kyu would find most of the book frustrating. But I do recommend it for people stronger than that. My guess is that perhaps a 4 kyu would enjoy enough of the problems to make it worthwhile; and probably even a fairly strong dan player would find most of the problems to make a satisfactory review. (That's only a guess: I've been a 4 kyu, but I've never been a 4 dan!)