|
The Way of Go
by Troy Anderson
Free
Press, 248 pages. $23
Reviewed by Joel
Turnipseed
When I first heard that Troy
Anderson's "The Way of Go" was coming out, I was thrilled. As a go player who
had started and sold a software company in the difficult years following the
dot-com bust, this promised to be a book written just for me. Unfortunately,
Anderson has written a book for nobody, and that's just who should read it.
This is a book whose business examples are so
hackneyed that anyone who can program their DVR to save "The Apprentice" will be
too sophisticated by half. And if you can calculate NPV on the handle of a
hockey-stick diagram in a PPM, you will downright giggle. (Note to non-MBA go
players: that last sentence is about how business readers will feel reading The
Way of Go).
A more important non-starter for
business readers who are not go players is the book's appendix on "How to Play
Go." If there's a more confusing, inelegant introduction to go, I haven't seen
it. Considering how far we've come in the fifteen years since I struggled to
learn go by scrounging Korean grocery stores for Ishi Press books, and how lucky
we are to have outstanding new beginner's books by William Cobb and Peter
Shotwell, it's sad that Anderson's book may poison a new generation of general
interest readers with its confusing and turgid exposition. At one point, instead
of explaining go's simple elegance simply and elegantly, Anderson quotes
Durkheim's "Elementary Forms of the Religious Life," in English, but referred to
by its French title.
Go players will not fare
much better. Books like Ma Xiaochun's "The Thirty-six Stratagems Applied to Go"
collect dust on my shelf for a good reason: the best way to appreciate the
fundamentals of go is to, well, appreciate the fundamentals of go, not the
obliquely-related heuristics or strategies of another endeavor. Admittedly, such
analogic reasoning can open our minds up to great surprise and delight when done
well. Unfortunately, this is tremendously difficult to do and Anderson's book is
just half-baked. As he states in his acknowledgements, the book had a "massive,
chaotic, and amorphous gestation." I've had games like that, but they've never
turned out very well.
In the end, I
think Anderson's book is best seen as a cautionary tale (with an ironic
recursive application). In trying to relate complex material from two different
disciplines to experts in neither, Anderson's failure bears a striking
resemblance to his description of the play of Greedy Sakata: "There is a big
difference between a deliberate amashi strategy and a nonstrategy needing
shinogi to survive because one gets into multiple bad positions." For masters of
chaos, real artists like Sakata, this can lead to some of life's great
extravagances. Unfortunately for Anderson (because I really would love for him
to have succeeded), The Way of Go is an ungainly dragon with no hope for
life.
Back to Reviews
|
|
