  We give a short personally-biased review on the recent progress in our
understanding of gravitational radiation reaction acting on a point particle
orbiting a black hole. The main motivation of this study is to obtain
sufficiently precise gravitational waveforms from inspiraling binary compact
stars with a large mass ratio. For this purpose, various new concepts and
techniques have been developed to compute the orbital evolution taking into
account the gravitational self-force. Combining these ideas with a few
supplementary new ideas, we try to outline a path to our goal here.
