This is by far my least favourite go book. In many ways I think reading this is more likely to make you worse at go than better!

Put simply, the message of the book is "When you can kill some stones, do so and disregard shape and everything else. When youcan't, don't". The rest of the book shows various examples where a kill either was on and how the players spotted it, or how it wasn't on and the players ruined the game playing an overplay.

I guess the book is mildly entertaining, and the fact that the examples are far too complex for amateurs to read out doesn't entirely destroy the thesis that you should trust your reading and kill whenever you can.

However I cannot recommend the book, I doubt there are many western players that would lose a game because they play shape rather than play a reasonable kill, and those few are unlikely to change after reading the book.

This criticism is unique to this book, Sakata's others are perfectly reasonable...

This is a book about killing groups, or preventing your groups from being killed. It mostly consists of examples from games, but there are also sections on killing techniques and on preventative measures.

It's a fun book, but I don't know how much it will actually improve your game. It's neat to see group after group dying, but I think that the ratio of examples from games to theory is too high for the book to be really helpful, and I think that a book on the middle game more generally would be more helpful still. But it does have good aspects, and in particular the Go v. Sakata game is quite nice - the commentary runs for 36 pages, and there's often only about five moves on a page, giving him time to go over each move in detail, considering the sorts of moves that amateurs play all the time but that professionals automatically reject and don't normally even bother mentioning in commentaries. And I did enjoy reading it.