The danger with this generalist approach is that the tyros are not quite hauled in (will they really want to know this much about US schools chess?), while aficionados are talked down to. Weinreb's book, like Shenk's, is aimed at a general audience who, while knowing the moves and having perhaps briefly been captivated (or appalled) by Fischer, are not familiar with the quirks of top-level chess. Neither genius nor madness is a prerequisite for playing it well, though boys (and the occasional girl) who enjoy making scale models of the Eiffel Tower using matchsticks are likely to do well. Chess is a highly technical game - dependent on calculating variations and working out move sequences - but it is not inherently intellectual. "The best players on our team," he quotes Murrow's captain as saying, "are a little bit strange." But this genius-close-to-madness theme can be overplayed: for every player who is crackers, there are a dozen who aren't. Weinreb, too, is attracted by the idea that chess players are innately wacky. Weinreb tells the story of the Edward R Murrow School in Brooklyn - a "public" (in US parlance) school founded on laissez-faire principles in 1974 that, up against all manner of elite establishments, has won the national schools chess championship six times, thanks mainly to a maths teacher called Eliot Weiss, who scours New York for prodigies. Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York appeared in the US last year, and now surfaces here. Shenk offers a free-form history of chess that juxtaposes a macro-level narrative of its spread from India and the Middle East to the courts of medieval Europe with a micro-analysis of a famous game played in London in 1851 between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky - the so-called "immortal game", won brilliantly by Anderssen after sacrificing queen, both rooks and a bishop staggering, inspiring and probably worth going mad for.Īmerican chess has been in decline since Fischer's self-imposed exile in 1975, but that hasn't staunched the flow of chess literature. Former British champion Bill Hartston once observed that "chess doesn't drive people mad, it keeps mad people sane" - an attractive, if contentious, idea. The board really is a world, and some players - often misfits in life - prefer not to stray outside it. So beware, if you ever become involved in this greatest of games with its infinite variety, rich history and capacity for beauty.
As Shenk says drily: "He insisted that he had played chess with God over an invisible telephone wire. Steinitz died in New York 14 years later, washed up, broke and probably insane. "Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer." Shenk sees a close relationship between chess and madness, citing the cases of Paul Morphy (a great 19th-century American player who became a paranoid recluse), Bobby Fischer (20th-century ditto) and the Austrian Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the first official world chess champion in 1886. How Life Imitates Chess, by Garry Kasparov 288pp, Heinemann, £20ĭavid Shenk's The Immortal Game begins with a warning from Albert Einstein. The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Oddballs, Geeks, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team, by Michael Weinreb 304pp, Yellow Jersey, £11.99 The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk 327pp, Doubleday, $26