All About Life and Death
All About Life and Death is a two volume set published by Ishi Press (later Kiseido) containing 200 common corner patterns that may live or die. For each pattern the correct line of play is shown as well as some variation diagrams.
This book (two volumes) is a translation from Japanese of volume 1 of Cho Chikun's Life and Death Dictionary listed on the dictionaries page.
Grauniad: Does anyone know where to buy this book?
juhtolv: It was published by Ishi Press, but then Ishi stopped releasing books. Kiseido has slowly resurrected books of Ishi Press, but this books is not yet resurrected. So, all you can do is to try to find it as used book, maybe from eBay.
jfc: I've heard the japanese language original has more material than the english translation. Considering the subject matter (I have the english version) I'm confident the original books would be of great value to folks who don't read japanese (like myself). I think this 2 volume set for sale at Yutopian is the japanese version.
Calvin: Aren't those Yutopian books Chinese translations? I've had luck getting this and other common Japanese references ----such as joseki and tesuji dictionaries---from Amazon's Japanese web site, http://www.amazon.co.jp. Even if you don't know Japanese, you can usually sort through the web site by comparing it to the English version, which has the same layout. Then you just need the ISBNs, but now that I've bought some books I don't need ISBNs, because my Amazon recommendations are pretty good there; I guess people who buy Cho's life and death dictionary probably really do buy other books I might want. :-) It's also good to have some control over what your shipping markup is going to be.
sergio0p: Yutopian has a Chinese translation of Cho Chikun's Life and Death dictionary. I just bought the two volumes after I bought an used English edition of volume one. Even if you don't know Chinese like me, the dictionary is quite useful as long as you know the sequence that problems are presented: first the problem, after it comes the best solution, sometimes the second best solution, ..., and then the mistakes.
sergio0p: The original edition is in Japanese (see the dictionaries page) but it is out of print. I was told by the sales staff at Kiseido that Yutopian is suppose to re-lease it July, 2005 (but I don't know if they were referring to the Japanese or the English edition).