I must admit I didn't expect much when I signed this book out of my local library after perusing it for a few seconds. But any book involving chess has to have value for a chess person, right!? It is worth reading, to be sure; I enjoyed it and even learned quite a bit! So, I am pleasantly surprised!
The book, with a somewhat confusing title, covers the 2016 World Championship match in New York, where champion GM Magnus Carlsen successfully defended his title against challenger GM Sergey Karjakin. Given that there are over 1,000 GMs in the world today, singling out one of them with "THE" is unfair to the others, somewhat. The author means GM Carlsen when he refers to "THE Grandmaster".
Author Brin-Jonathan Butler is a Canadian who loves chess, with previous non-chess published work to his credit. He spends quite a bit of the book on what one could call a 'stream of consciousness', perhaps telling us more than we really need to know about himself, his chess experiences, and personal episodes! I nearly put the book away for good while reading this stretch. He gets into live, on-site coverage of the Match, which he identifies as the event "which made chess great again". I am unsure if or when chess stopped being great.
The book is different, and targets the casual chess enthusiast, more so than the serious chess person. What he does write is very good; the book may need a second read to be appreciated in full, since much of the early material seems to be irrelevant to his theme. He does pull it all together quite well, in the end!
Simon & Schuster, 2018, 224 pages, ISBN 1501172603.
The book, with a somewhat confusing title, covers the 2016 World Championship match in New York, where champion GM Magnus Carlsen successfully defended his title against challenger GM Sergey Karjakin. Given that there are over 1,000 GMs in the world today, singling out one of them with "THE" is unfair to the others, somewhat. The author means GM Carlsen when he refers to "THE Grandmaster".
Author Brin-Jonathan Butler is a Canadian who loves chess, with previous non-chess published work to his credit. He spends quite a bit of the book on what one could call a 'stream of consciousness', perhaps telling us more than we really need to know about himself, his chess experiences, and personal episodes! I nearly put the book away for good while reading this stretch. He gets into live, on-site coverage of the Match, which he identifies as the event "which made chess great again". I am unsure if or when chess stopped being great.
The book is different, and targets the casual chess enthusiast, more so than the serious chess person. What he does write is very good; the book may need a second read to be appreciated in full, since much of the early material seems to be irrelevant to his theme. He does pull it all together quite well, in the end!
Simon & Schuster, 2018, 224 pages, ISBN 1501172603.
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