Mihai Suba's book is a compilation of notes and games about the system that is his lifelong love. The book deals with what I would call the "Hedgehog Proper," which includes c4, Nf3 and a g3/Bg2 fianchetto for White, ...c5,...Nf6, ...e6, ..b6 and, after White plays d4, Black follows with ...cxd4, ...a6 and ...d6. Black normally puts his bishops on b7 and e7, and his knights on f6 and d7, but Suba also discusses double fianchetto systems and a ...Nc6 option.

In the Introduction, he says "This book was designed for both study and entertainment--easy to read and hard to forget." Whether it fully succeeds I'm not sure, but there are some wonderful comments and stories. Speaking of Ratmir Kholmov's tendency to "get altogether drunk" with greatly reduced chess powers, Suba talks about "a long list of stories and jokes arising from his habit," relating one passed on to him by Karpov: "The game starts 1.e4 Nc6 2.f4 b6 3.Nf3 e5 4.fxe5. At this point Ratmir plunges into deep thought, while whispering 'I've played the Grunfeld all my life and never got into such a bad position!'"

Suba's annotations are both insightful and lively, yet the overall plan of the book is off-putting. Even Suba cannot much lighten up a format with imbedded, mostly unannotated games, or, similarly, raw scores piled up after one another at the end of each main game. To the end of my reviewing days, apparently, I will have to protest against this facile and increasingly meaningless use of the "complete game" format, produced by the direct cutting and pasting of ChessBase games. I couldn't begin to find the specific positions I was looking for, some of which seemed to appear in different locations. Suba discusses move order issues at several points, but without coming to any conclusions. In one place he makes a useful statistical comparison between early ...d6, ...a6, and ...Be7 orders; but elsewhere, using another set of statistics about precisely the same orders, he employs a fallacious statistical method and gets an absurd result.

The point is that the book should have used a traditional tree variation structure, with transpositions noted. Barring that, the index should be very comprehensive, with transpositions. Amazingly, however, there is no index at all.

My conclusion: for general understanding of the ideas and practice of the Hedgehog, this is a very good book by an insightful, entertaining author who very much knows the subject matter. Unfortunately, if you want a specific repertoire to play, or an easy way to look up lines, you will be disappointed.

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