Daniel Johnson's "White King and Red Queen"

Daniel Johnson's White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War was Fought on the Chessboard, reviewed quite favorably today by David Edmonds at the Times Online (with an extract) and recently by Sally Feldman ("Check Republics") at New Humanist, is the latest in a long line of culturally and historically informed books on chess, which includes David Shenk's The Immortal Game (reviewed here last year), Paul Hoffman's King's Gambit (which is great and I've been meaning to review it forever), Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York (also great, with a review half-written), J. C. Hallman's The Chess Artist, and Edmonds and John Eidinow's Bobby Fischer Goes to War. I imagine Johnson's will be a very fine addition to this mushrooming literature, and better (in my view) than Edmonds's own book focused on the Fischer-Spassky match, which seemed satified merely to retell (albeit in excellent detail) the story of the 1972 World Chess Championship, with little in the way of cultural context.

I've referenced Johnson's work here before, and likely some of the current book derives from his excellent essay "Cold War Chess" (also in PDF) in Prospect, which was mentioned here in connection with NM Scott Massey's 2005 lecture on Moscow 1925. He also had one of the earliest reviews of Kasparov's How Life Imitates Chess (see "Garry Kasparov's Deadly Game"), which--like Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning, Bruce Pandolfini's Every Move Must Have a Purpose, and Peter Kurzdorfer's The Tao of Chess--analyzes the meanings of the game for the PowerPoint crowd. Though these books are also interesting in their way, I generally prefer my chess analysis to go a little deeper than that, and Johnson's writings show that he has an impressive ability to do just that. I look forward to getting my copy for Holiday reading.

Karna Small Bodman

Karna Small Bodman, who worked at the White House during the Reagan administration, has two recent novels with chess-related titles. They may interest readers who enjoy political thrillers.

Review of Zugzwang (A Novel)

The Guardian reviews Ronan Bennett's novel Zugzwang ("The great game"), which we mentioned when it was first serialized in The Observer. I was disappointed that the author felt licensed to introduce a fictional chessplayer into the famous tournament of St. Petersburg 1914 (where the term "Grandmaster" was introduced) which serves as the plot's backdrop. But if you are not troubled by such things, it is certainly a good read and an interesting psychological murder mystery.

Summer Reading (without a Board)

Mark Weeks offers up two excellent annotated lists of "Chess Books to Read without a Board" (one for non-fiction and one for fiction) at his About.com:Chess site. I don't think I could improve much on his lists, though I found the absence of Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin in non-fiction rather puzzling. Perhaps he considered it too dated or too well-known to include, though it is still in print and better than the movie. And The Chess Players by Frances Parkinson Keyes is missing from fiction. It is a rather stilted and overly-fanciful historical romance about Paul Morphy, but it is fun to read in the right frame of mind (especially if you have a mind warped by years of graduate literary study), and I found it worth reading for the quotations at the head of each chapter alone. Jim West offers up a nicely balanced review at his blog. It does not seem to be in print but is worth looking for at a used book shop. I found my own copy one summer many years back at a little used book shop on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, and remember reading it in the sun with my feet buried deep in the hot sand....

Bill Wall offers up a long list of "Fiction Literature and Chess" at his website for those seeking an even larger selection. However, having wasted an inordinate amount of time long ago tracking down and slogging through many fictional works about chess, I can assure you that Weeks has chosen only the best.

Hat tip to Scholastic Chess Gateway.