<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Good book troubled by editing errors
Review: This book is best summarized as a series of short articles. Some of the articles are interesting and some are not.Different aspects of chess are covered: miniatures, trivia, puzzles, theory etc. Most of the individual groupings are fun... and most are well written. However, some are not. The worst parts of this book bore us with the history of misspellings of famous players names; their obituaries and such. Some of the best parts (the puzzles and miniatures) are troubled by poor editing of the chess lines(see below). This is somewhat resolved by the general good quality of the puzzles themselves(...)Overall I would give this book 3 and a half stars. The binding is nice (and better than -say- an Everyman chess binding) but the poor editorship really is taxing.
Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, original, meticulous and hilarious
Review: This book is incredibly good. Many chess writers recycle old (and often inaccurate) information from other books, but that is definitely not Winter's way. This book is remarkably accurate and is written in sparkling English. The research and editing are superb. The book contains hundreds of unknown games and positions, thousands of unknown or forgotten facts (many of them historical but also with plenty of topical comment) and all in all it is simply terrific. Winter doesn't pull his punches and can be hilarious when panning sloppy or dishonest hack-writing. Five stars hardly do justice to this wonderful book!
<< 1 >>
| 
