Rating: 
Summary: Useless drivel
Review: This book is so preoccupied with giving every one of Kmoch's hare-brained schemes a fancy dumb name. I pity the weak player who thinks that after reading this pathetic excuse for a chess book that he could ever beat me in a game of chess. I had two copies of this nook- one copy I threw in the garbage and the other copy I gave away. I wanted to play chess and improve, not waste my time on super hype nonsense. Terrible book in descriptive notation no less. Marovic's Understanding Pawn Play is a real book.
Rating: 
Summary: what you didn't know about pawns
Review: This is an excellent book for players of the game at all levels. The first 2 chapters alone are worth the price of the book. These concentrate on the basis of all pawn operations from not only a practical but also a tactical standpoint. From there you learn the effects that the pawn structure can have on your minor pieces and rooks in detail with wonderful examples from masters games such as Alekhine and Capablanca. Then comes the unexpected when you learn how to use such tactics as "sweeping and sealing" & "the center fork trick". This book leaves no stone unturned and can only have a positive effects on the games of players at all levels.
Rating:
Summary: A classic.
Review: This is fun and instructive. Just knowing about sealers and sweepers ought to win many games for you. Another interesting way to learn about pawns is to play eight pawns versus eight pawns, in their starting positions--no pieces, no Kings. The first one to make it to the eighth rank wins. En passant is in effect, of course. Play 20 or more games like this and learn lots of little tricks, about zugzwang, for instance
Rating:
Summary: Profound treatment of underappreciated aspect of the game.
Review: Very clear presentation of the elements of pawn play in all aspects of the game. Excellent, clear examples from real games with insightful analysis but without the dozens of variations that make for dense print, heavy reading and constant resetting of the pieces. Individual chapters on pawns and knights, pawns and bishops, pawns and rooks, as well as treatment of good and bad bishops, knights vs bishops, etc. Great illustrative game excerpts with just the subject pieces and also in combination with other pieces.Explores how the pawn structure provides the basis for the standard themes in each type of position and how it should influence planning and strategy in the handling of the middlegame resulting from various openings. Gems of wisdom regarding when the pawn structure is favorable to each piece, how the pieces relate to the structure, and initiating changes in the pawn structure are scattered throughout the text. This is a great reference for any player, but probably of most value to those with a fair or better command of piece play and tactics and an established repertoire of openings who want to raise their games a notch, or more - club and tournament players who are moving up past 1500 and beyond. This is an older book presented in descriptive rather than algebraic notation and Kmoch uses a unique terminology, but neither fact should be an issue for anyone with the brain power to perform chess analysis.
Rating: 
Summary: less a religious revelation than a new way of thinking
Review: When I was 20 years younger and my rating was 300 points lower (but I feel as though my play was 3000X more interesting), I continually ran into folks who said that they really advanced their game by reading Pawn Power in Chess. Finally, I got around to reading it. It has some really useful insights into how to think about pawn chains. I didn't find that it had the miracle cure for their rating that those who recommended the book apparently had, but it's good to see a systematic way of thinking about pawn structure in a simple guide, even if the Benoni structures given much attention here are not structures that appear much in my simple-minded games. A good read, an interesting concept, not quite a religious revelation.
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