“As an adolescent, I fancied myself a devotee of the ancient Chinese board game Go. I had never actually played it, but in one of my favorite novels — “Shibumi,” by Trevanian — the super-assassin hero praised Go as a fitting pastime for the kind of warrior/poet/lover he was and that I hoped to become. “Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting,” he says, probably before killing someone with a toothpick. Sadly, when I actually tried to play Go, it turned out be … a board game, and a difficult one at that. I gave it up when I realized that in return for the labor of truly learning Go, I would become not an enlightened international assassin, but just a guy who could play a game.” Peter Sagal, host of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” reviews Oliver Roeder’s “SEVEN GAMES A Human History” in The New York Times; read more here.
