MilenPetrov wrote on 10/28/14 at 14:18:19:
Got the book today and flipped some pages and lines. At first sight it is very hard reading... too much moves, messy Lines structure. I am not speaking about pure chess content at the moment...only my first impressions about the organization of the book, unclear diagrams (looks like screen grab), layout etc. I will start checking the real content tonight and hopefully will come back with a full review in a few days. For now from what I saw I can assess it as 1out of 5 stars, but again need to check pure chess content.
I agree that the design and layout could have been better - it doesn't feel very user-friendly. However, the editors have clearly made an effort to help the reader navigate the variation's complexities and so perhaps with use one will become accustomed to it. In its favour, there is quite a lot of explanatory prose scattered throughout the book, but I think that a strategic introduction and maybe chapter summaries would have been useful. I'm guessing that many readers will use it more as a work of reference than as a learning tool.
So, I wouldn't really recommend this book to anyone wishing to take up the Rauser as Black from scratch, as part of a Classical Sicilian repertoire. For that, I think the best books are still, and in order, Easy Guide to the Classical Sicilian and Chess Explained-the Classical Sicilian. I think the former is fantastically helpful in explaining the main ideas and even many important nuances, enabling the reader to start playing the lines with a degree of confidence fairly quickly. Obviously the theory in some lines has moved on, but I think that the Easy Guide, plus a good database, is all that most amateurs would need to get started playing the Classical.
Incidentally, I notice that the line of the Rauser that was all the rage in the 1990s, when it was Kramnik's favourite, 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 Nc6 6.Bg5 e6 7.Qd2 a6 8.0-0-0 h6. which was thought to rendered practically unplayable by the line 9.Nxc6 bxc6 10.Bf4 d5 11.Qe3, is refusing to die. As well as continued support from Kosteniuk (who has been playing the Classical since she was a child), there are recent games featuring other strong players as Black, such as A.Vovk (2614), C.Lupulescu (2630) and even one of the co-authors of the The Richter-Rauser Reborn, A.Jankovic (2547)!!