3.5

2.5 stars

I saw another review refer to this as a "chess beach read" and I'm inclined to agree. The bit that really kept my attention was the walkthrough of The Immortal Game. This "history of chess" is light on the history and jumps around too much for my liking. It doesn't even touch on Russia's history with the game until a later chapter, which devotes more time to Garry Kasparov and his matches with the Deep Blue computer systems. Not what I was expecting.

Popsugar 2022: Book with a board game in the title

This is the second book I've read about the history of chess this year (the first was Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom). While they are both excellent treatments of the subject, I think I like The Immortal Game better.

It's just more fun. The Immortal Game has a sort of whimsy about it which I find appropriate because chess is, after all, merely a game (despite the intellectual and historical heft it can throw around after 1400 years). Of course, they're very different works, so that comparison is not truly fair.

Birth of the Chess Queen was a study of the history of the game and the way society changed around it. The Immortal Game is more of a study of the way play styles evolved and how peoples of various times related themselves to the game of kings.

Unsurprisingly, the book is named after its most striking feature: a move-by-move analysis of a casual game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky from 1851. This particular match, of course, is dubbed "The Immortal Game". Move-by-move, the author examines how chess thought changed and how players of each generation would see the given board position. As a chess novice, I found this view eye-opening.

This is an excellent work for anyone who plays chess or even just has a passing interest in a game that practically marks modern civilization.

A fascinating overview of Chess's impact on human history, culture, art, religion, science, etc. I have been getting into chess over the last year or so, and have found myself much more interested in the cultural production and history of chess than trying to study openings or get any better at it. This book was just what I was looking for.

I came away from this book with a ton of anecdotes to annoy my co-workers with, and more knowledge on figures I had heard mention of (Alekhine, Philidor) in openings but didn't really know the full story of. I was also fascinated by the appearance of all kinds of historical figures across Chess' thousand-year reign, Napoleon, Ben Franklin, Marcel Duchamp, Lenin, and Marx are all mentioned.

Chess is an abstraction that has influenced nearly every area of our culture in some way. Just a completely fascinating, timeless game that has been a companion to human development for a thousand years. Really enjoyed this book.

Really nice overview of the history of chess. Will definitely take up chess seriously after listening to this.

Well written with a wealth of information on chess, I enjoyed the book. The only weakness comes at the end when the author attempts to use chess as a cure for all the world's ills; a bridge too far.

I particularly enjoyed the dissection of the Immortal Game carried throughout the book. The author drips out two moves at a time with analysis and background to enhance the drama.

If you've ever spent any time pushing pawns, you'll enjoy this one.

While this is advertised as a history of chess, it is more of an anthropological study of the effects of chess on various facets of society, from religion to artificial intelligence. The text is entertaining and readable, but it's not really full of information. Good for a light read, but you'll probably want more eventually.

Well, I can't believe I'm saying it, but this history of chess is genuinely fun, fascinating, generous to a beginner, engaging and quotable. The only section I felt let down by was when Shenk considers that chess may lead to madness in extreme cases - out-dated and reductive fear-mongering that confuses correlation with causality. Overall, the subject matter and tiny font make it a hard sell, but I heartily recommend this to any interested party, especially ones who, like me and- surprisingly- the author, are curious but unrigorous (and unashamed) amateurs.

This COULD be an interesting history. However the author has muddled it up so much and jumps around so often that the book is hard to follow and there's little sense of chronicity. Not one of the better examples of non-fiction I've run across.

This was a surprisingly fantastic book. I love the way it's written, something about the language just made my want to keep reading and the structure of using parts of the Immortal Game to introduce new topics and aspects of the game of chess was a really neat device, and the way he described the Immortal Game itself made me keep reading through the beginning of the next chapter before stopping for the night.

It also helps that the author seems to have the same outlook on chess as I do: He finds it fascinating, but daunting. He'd like to be good at it, but he wants to play without studying opening moves and established strategy.