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Manny Rayner's book reviews
I love reviewing books - have been doing it at Goodreads, but considering moving here.
Currently reading
The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence For Evolution
R in Action
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
McGee on Food and Cooking: An Encyclopedia of Kitchen Science, History and Culture
Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood
Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)
Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology
The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition
200 Open Games
I never really played open games a great deal when I was a serious chess player, so this book didn't influence me as much as it otherwise might have done. But while people are paying tribute to the recently departed greats, I must share this rather moving story that I saw in a recent number of New In Chess. It was written by Bronstein's widow, and she was talking about his last days. He'd had a massive stroke, and it had clearly affected his mind. She wanted to know how much, so she asked him a few simple questions: his name, where he was born, stuff like that. He answered everything correctly. And then she said:
"David, who was the greatest ever interpreter of the King's Indian Defence?"
She was clearly expecting him to say that he was - many people consider he had an obvious claim. But Bronstein whispered:
"Geller..."
Courteous, exact and kind of amusing even on his deathbed. You can see why the whole chess world loved him.
