®| ® |
|
|
|---|
Last update: Friday June 3, 2005 9:44
by Andrew Soltis
McFarland, 265 pages, £33 (hardback)
This
is Andrew Soltis' latest tome in a distinguished series of expensive but beautifully
produced McFarland publications. Bombarded as we are by millennium reviews,
rating lists and league tables of all kinds, it is difficult to enthuse over
yet another "100 Best…" book; but happily this one is very worthwhile.
The Introduction sets out Soltis' selection principles in detail. He scrutinised 7000 candidate games for "overall aesthetic quality", "originality", "level of opposition", "soundness, accuracy and difficulty", and "breadth and depth", awarding them marks out of 20 for each category. These categories inevitably sound vague, so Soltis helpfully explains each by annotating an attractive game which is nevertheless clearly deficient in the category in question. Personally I dislike attaching numbers to aesthetic impressions, but Soltis does make a good case for his method, and it gives continuity to the whole book, something that this type of collection can easily lack.
After two entertaining and provocative chapters - "The Most Overrated Games" and "Near Misses" - Soltis gets to the meat, with the highest scoring games first. Each game is preceded by a small introduction, sometimes anecdotal, with a morsel of biographical information on the players. Soltis' historical homework also extends to the annotations, as he often includes contemporary comments on the older games. Generally the notes are concise but readable, with opening theory and variations trimmed to the essentials. I feel Soltis takes concision too far with the more tactically complex games, though: for example the top-ranked game, Estrin-Berliner, World Correspondence Championship 1965-1968, is unfathomably difficult, and some of the annotations (e.g. at move 13) do little to clarify matters. Full coverage would admittedly consume half the book, but the frustration remains.
Certain omissions are surprising: not a single Karpov win makes the top 100, compared with five by Capablanca - and there is a clear preference for decisive rather than drawn games. But why not? Tastes differ, and Soltis sees no need to defer to modern big names when he has found brilliance among older, often lesser-known players. This is a book to savour, well-written and full of good material.
James Vigus