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 just [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

by James Schroeder Once upon a time a man found a large bone, flat on two sides. He put a mark on one side and two marks on the other side and then found another man with whom he gambled. The man tossed the bone in the air and the other man called one, or [...]

Book/movie review © 2003 James Schroeder The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabakov. 1930. Translated from Russian by Michael Scammell in collaboration with the author. Copyright 1964. I have read the novel and the movie is an atrocious disgrace that has only superficial resemblance to the story. In short: Luzhin is a Russian who suffers from [...]

Movie review © 2004 James Schroeder “The Chess Player” From the novel by Henri Bupuy-Mazuel. Produced by La Societe des Films Historiaues. 1926. France. This is a melodrama, starting in the town of Vilnius in Polish Lithuania in 1776, which is occupied by Russian soldiers of Catherine the Great. The leader of the Polish resistance [...]

[Click HERE for floating game board.] Copyright © 2006 James Schroeder It was a beautiful spring morning about to turn into a sunny afternoon, for which Southern California was famous. Twenty years later Harry would remember it nostalgically as “the good old days”. It was a Saturday, a day off from work. Having very little [...]

Why Lasker Matters by Andrew Soltis, © 2005 Batsford Other than having many great games by the best chess player of all time, this book is worthless. How can anyone look at all Lasker’s games and read everything by him and about him and not learn anything? Instead of analyzing the games correctly, Soltis puts [...]

Everyman Press © 2006 This abominable series is almost worthless because there are hundreds of factual errors and the games are full of useless analysis. Ego-maniac Kasparov says: “I discovered this move which has been unknown for fifty years,” or forty, or thirty, etc. His “great” discovery is crap, leading to a “quicker” win – [...]