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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
Garry Kasparov's books are always seething with emotion, but it's a little hard to see that if you're not a chessplayer yourself. This book is a drenched-in-nostalgia look at the 70s, the Golden Age of chess analysis. Fischer had just captured the world title mainly due to his stunning opening preparation. Under his influence, top players everywhere - but particularly in the Soviet Union - were busily creating new systems. Kasparov tells you about their exciting discoveries - the Hedgehog, the Sveshnikov Variation, the resurgent Petrov Defence, Larsen's reinterpretation of the Meran, and many more. And now all these lands are under the wave... with grandmaster-level software generally available, anyone can be a chess analyst. The rigorous clarity that Kasparov so painfully acquired is obsolete. It's very tragic. So, in an attempt to provide subtitles, here's
If Revolution in the 70s Had Been Written By Ray Bradbury
"What's your name?" Montag asked.
"Cassie," she said. "I'm your neighbour. We moved in a few weeks ago."
"And what do you do?" he continued, not knowing what else to say.
"I'm a chessplayer," she said defiantly. "Or, more exactly, a chess analyst."
The rest of this review is in my book What Pooh Might Have Said to Dante and Other Futile Speculations
