A few heuristics about pawns guide my play: put your pawns in the center, avoid doubling your pawns, avoid backward pawns, attack the center when attacked in the flank, attack the flank when attacked in the center, and of course if you have a passed pawn, push it! I hoped The Power of Pawns would expand on those ideas in a clear, structured way. Instead, the instruction on pawns is implicit and not systematic. The author illustrates broad themes through high level games, which he only sparsely annotates. The games covered in each chapter are unified by a theme, but mostly you have to work that out for yourself because Hickl appears to assume it’s so obvious that he doesn’t need to comment most of the time. Overall, Hickl presents the reader with full games where pawn structures play a critical role, but he doesn’t always spell out the key lessons or distill general principles.