The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain in Chess Readers and Writers

Apr 25, 2014 Will Once rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book is an interesting viewpoint on the game of chess. That's "interesting" as in unusual, thought-provoking, unexpected.

The author is clearly not a chess player, so the perspective he offers is not your normal Grandmaster ghost-authored fare. He tells a sort of history of chess interspersed with the moves of the Immortal Game (Anderssen-Kieseritzky, London 1851).

There is a lot to like here. David Shenk is a good writer with a clear and engaging style. The book is sort of well researched wi This book is an interesting viewpoint on the game of chess. That's "interesting" as in unusual, thought-provoking, unexpected.

The author is clearly not a chess player, so the perspective he offers is not your normal Grandmaster ghost-authored fare. He tells a sort of history of chess interspersed with the moves of the Immortal Game (Anderssen-Kieseritzky, London 1851).

There is a lot to like here. David Shenk is a good writer with a clear and engaging style. The book is sort of well researched with some interesting anecdotes and insights.

The observant will notice that I've repeated "sort of" and "interesting". That might sound like damning with faint praise and I have to say that there's a "but" coming.

You see, the history that David Shenk has chosen to tell has some surprising omissions. The chess machine Capablanca merits barely one sentence. The magician from Riga - Tal? Another single sentence (and then only as a comparison to Fischer). It feels as if we get lots of very early history then we leap from the romantics to Fischer-Spassky 1972 with hardly a mention of the world champions in between.

What we do get is some fairly stock stuff about Fischer and Kasparov vs Deep Blue. It's okay, but nothing that we haven't seen before.

There are some interesting (that word again!) philosophical musings about the meaning of chess, life, madness ... Some of these are really good, some are a bit more questionable.

The choice of the immortal game is a bit odd. To be sure it's a justifiably famous and interesting (ahem!) game to illustrate. But it's not a typical chess game any more as it represents a swashbuckling style of play that is rarely seen these days. It's also possibly a little too complicated for non-chess players and too well known for experienced players.

I hovered over giving three or four stars for this review. Any book which gets people interested in chess has to be a good thing. He does write well, and there are several good parts to the book. My main quibble is with the claim that this is a history of chess. It isn't. It's one man's view about the bits of chess history that interests him. There's nothing wrong with that, because what he does talk about is interesting. Sort of.
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Sep 28, 2012 Charles rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: chess

Great chess book. This isn't just a dry history book, here history chapters are seperated by a captivationing narative of the Immortal Game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. The history chapters themselfs show how chess and culture affected each other trough out time giving as a vividly readable book. ...more

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