Purdy was a prolific writer, and his writing was of such a consistently high quality, that the selection of instructional articles for inclusion in the book must have presented quite a problem. At any rate, we get a generous sampling…
Category: Chess books
A review of The Seven Deadly Chess Sins by Jonathan Rowson
Will The Seven Deadly Chess Sins – a book that doesn’t directly concern itself with tactics or strategy, opening variations or theoretical endings – make you a better chess player? My answer would be yes. It cannot help but give you a…
A review of Smart Chip from St.Petersburg and other tales of a bygone chess era by Genna Sosonko
Smart Chip from St.Petersburg and other tales of a bygone chess era is an immensely fascinating collection of Genna Sosonko’s chess journalism. Many of the pieces in this book, as in his earlier Russian Silhouettes (also reviewed at this site), will especially appeal…
A review of How to Beat Your Dad at Chess by Murray Chandler
This ambivalence regarding its readership is unfortunate, because How to Beat Your Dad at Chess (the title, alas, is uninformative about the book’s content) is an elementary introduction to tactics – and especially checkmating patterns – that would be very useful for…
A review of Why Lasker Matters by Andrew Soltis
Yet surely the chief reason, the darkest cloud obscuring Lasker’s greatness, is to be found in the myths concerning his play. It has been said that he would deliberately play “bad” moves to unbalance the position in a game, that…
A review of Russian Silhouettes by Genna Sosonko
In Russian Silhouettes (and later in The Reliable Past: New in Chess, 2003) he describes a game, a sphere of human creativity, that amid nightmarish and fantastic oppression attracted the genius, the dreamer, the damaged and otherworldly, and the angry…