Kings, Commoners and Knaves: Further Chess Explorations [Mass Market Paperback]

This book is incredibly good. Many chess writers recycle old (and often inaccurate) information from other books, but that is definitely not Winter's way. This book is remarkably accurate and is written in sparkling English. The research and editing are superb. The book contains hundreds of unknown games and positions, thousands of unknown or forgotten facts (many of them historical but also with plenty of topical comment) and all in all it is simply terrific. Winter doesn't pull his punches and can be hilarious when panning sloppy or dishonest hack-writing. Five stars hardly do justice to this wonderful book!

Edward Winter again presents us with a collection of historical essays, book reviews, forgotten positions, biographical details, quotes, and photographs from his long-running "Chess Notes" column. Winter's goal, as he says elsewhere, is to find out new (or rediscovered) true information about chess history, and to point out false statements and tall tales that are copied from one lousy chess book to another as "history".

The book therefore contains--among much else--many interesting but forgotten games and compositions, biographical material about unjustly forgotten players, and, to this reader the most interesting part of the book, historical investigations into alleged incidents in the lives of famous players. Very often, Winter shows that the sensational tales, both positive and negative, told about many chess masters (either praising their "genius" or blaiming the "crazy" or "immoral" chess master) are based on no facts at all.

This doesn't mean Winter covers up the unpleasant truth. For example, Winter's detailed investigation does not cover up the evidence pointing towards the conclusion that Alekhine did write of his free will the anti-Jewish articles signed by him which he later claimed he was forced to do against his will. But he also allows Alekhine's defenders (including Alekhine himself) in this matter a fair hearing, and wisely comments that the full story will probably have to wait until Alekhine's personal archives are made available to the public. What Winter objects to isn't criticism, even severe criticism, but libel--such as Fine's notorious remark that Alekhine was was "the sadist of the chessboard", for no good reason.

I suspect the book's most often-read section is, alas, the one dealing with book reviews. To many people, reading scathing book reviews that show how bad a book is is a guilty pleasure, and indeed many of Winter's reviews are scathing. Perhaps, in retrospect, Winter might have avoided much of the controversy surrounding KCK, leaving its historical and research value intact, by cutting out the 10% (or so) of KCK devoted to reviews of books and leaving only the purely historical material. Indeed, in the last decade, Winter had practically ceased to write book reviews, presumably deciding such reviews produce far more heat than light.

That said, Winter's scathing criticism is invariably (so far as I can tell) well-justified and always well-documented with numerous examples. The 'Knaves' of the chess world--those who write meretricious "ooks" (Martin Gardner's term to describe worthless potboilers that do not deserve to be called "books")--get what's coming to them from Winter's pen.

The one "criticism" I have of this book is that not all the material in it interested me--but only about 90% of it. This, of course, is not real criticism: tastes vary, and any book of chess history that is 100% interesting to one reader is sure to be of 0% interest to another. Winter, however, has done such a good job of selection that I strongly suspect this book will be 90% interesting to just about *anybody* with interest in chess history; and that is a great achievement indeed.

This book is best summarized as a series of short articles. Some of the articles are interesting and some are not.

Different aspects of chess are covered: miniatures, trivia, puzzles, theory etc. Most of the individual groupings are fun... and most are well written. However, some are not.

The worst parts of this book bore us with the history of misspellings of famous players names; their obituaries and such.

Some of the best parts (the puzzles and miniatures) are troubled by poor editing of the chess lines(see below). This is somewhat resolved by the general good quality of the puzzles themselves(...)Overall I would give this book 3 and a half stars. The binding is nice (and better than -say- an Everyman chess binding) but the poor editorship really is taxing.

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