Soviet Chess 1917 - 1991 by Andrew Soltis, 2000, McFarland and Company
Soltis is notorious for writing the worst researched books in history. This has so many factual errors it is worthless. It is very poorly written and abounds with inane comments such as “The tragedy of Spassky’s brief reign was that it came […]

New York 1936: The First Modern United States Chess Championship by John Hilbert and Peter Lahde
review by James Schroeder
In 1985 I discovered that the John White Dept. of the Cleveland Public Library had a box containing the original game scores of the 1936 U.S. Chess Championship Tournament. So I hand-copied all of them and […]

From behind the Iron Curtain and out of the deep freezer of the Cold War emerged a cold-blooded chess assassin, a man of iron will, iron discipline, iron technique: Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, World Champion 1948-1957, 1958-1960, and 1961-61, dominated the chess world after WWII in a way that no doubt made his political and ideological […]

American Chess Masters from Morphy to Fischer by Arthur Bisguier and Andrew Soltis; Macmillan Publishing Company; 1974
Many years later Soltis said that he alone wrote all of the book. Despite agreeing to help write the book, Bisguier did nothing at all, for which he should be thanked, as this is absolutely worthless trash.
There is […]

Grandmasters of Chess by Harold Schonberg; 1st ed. Lippincott 1973; revised WW Norton & Co. 1981.
Grandmasters of Chess by Harold Schonberg is a rotten book that consists of yellow jounalism based upon the writer’s ignorance and incredible stupidity. Mr. Schonberg does not understand chess, chess masters, chess history, or anything else of what he […]