Though I play chess about as well as my 9-year-old (and about as often as Americans elect as a president), I love to read non-fiction books about the game. Among those I’d highly recommend would be THE CHESS ARTIST, BOBBY FISCHER GOES TO WAR and THE TURK. Now one can add to that list David Shenk’s 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.
With vintage illustrations, Shenk traces the game’s shadowy origins, interestingly considered sacrilegious by some religions and world leaders. But the more recent (comparatively speaking) the book gets, the more interesting it is, as so much of its early history comes off as purely apocryphal. The last half delves into chess’ true obsessives, like the rare player who could play multiple games blindfolded, the presumably schizophrenic antics of Bobby Fischer, others driven to lifelong mental illnesses and institutions.
Among the more fascinating tidbits and stories Shenk relates include influential surrealist Marcel Duchamp abandoning art once he caught the chess bug, Garry Kasparov’s celebrated matches against the IBM computer Deep Blue, and one Freudian disciple who saw chess as a sexualized metaphor, in which the goal was the castrate the king.
But the best part of THE IMMORTAL GAME comes from what’s interspersed between each chapter: a play-by-play account of an 1851 practice session between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky. Considered so brilliant it’s dubbed “the immortal game” itself, the men’s match generates much suspense as Shenk simply and clearly describes each of its 23 moves with startling drama. I seriously could have read a whole book just on that one game.
By the time Shenk ends his book with a bittersweet observation of elementary school students learning the game, you’re sorry to see it end. But for true aficionados of the game, it doesn’t; appendices galore remain, including diagrammed recaps of five historic games and Benjamin Franklin’s “Morals of Chess” article from 1786. Though it’s not the definitive work on the subject, Shenk’s GAME earns high marks in the departments of organization, research and style, written on a level enjoyable for any reader regardless of his chess mastery or disastery. –Rod Lott
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