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Chess Notebook 28 Jun 1959, Sun The Boston Globe (Boston, Massachusetts) Newspapers.com
Chess Notebook By Lyman Burgess
THE ADVENTURE OF CHESS By Edward Lasker, xxiv + 296 pp. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. $1.45.
Dr. Lasker's famous 1950 opus makes a welcome appearance in this inexpensive paperbound edition. It defies classification: it is more than a potpourri and less than a history although it combines some of the best aspects of both. It is entertainingly informative and unfailingly accurate.
The book proper opens with “The Indian Ancestry of Chess” and closes with two chapters on automation; the first on chess playing automata (fakes to the last) and the second on an electronic chess player (the McCoy). In between Lasker ranges over such subjects as “Chess, Music and Mathematics,” “Chess Mentality” (a study of chessplayers by psychologists), “Chess in Literature and Art,” and “Famous Chess Amateurs.”
The book concludes with a chess primer (pp 231-296). Seldom has so much been offered for so little; a four-star best buy.
THE ART OF CHESS. By James Mason, revised and edited by Fred Reinfeld and Sidney Bernstein. 378 pp. New York: Dover. $1.85.
The original Mason work was published in 1898 and revised by Leopold Hoffer in 1913. This edition is a reprint of the Reinfeld-Bernstein 1947 version.
Divided into three main sections, endings, combinations and openings, “The Art of Chess” in its present incarnation is strongest in the end game and weakest in the opening. The middle game section, appropriately enough, is middling.
David Ames, Quincy, is noted to readers of this fine prose primarily for his fine eye for fine end games: David also plays fine chess. There follows a correspondence game 1957-8.
David Ames (white) vs. Heap (black)
French Defense: Alekhine-Chatard Attack, Teichmann Variation
A rook check next move will allow B-K4ch with regicide to follow.
