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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
Winning With the Petroff (Batsford Chess Library)
If you're not a chess player, you won't appreciate quite how strange the title of this book is. The Petroff is Black's most conservative defense to 1. e4. It is extremely hard to crack, but gives negligible winning chances, and spectators often groan inwardly when they see it played in top-level matches; the most likely result is yet another quick draw. Some columnists have gone as far as to say that it will eventually kill chess altogether. Since Anatoly Karpov is a former World Champion, and played the Petroff many times during his extremely distinguished career, he obviously knows this better than any of us.So... "Winning with the Petroff". I suppose the publishers told him that "Drawing Safely with the Petroff" wasn't going to sell many copies. But I'm still a little surprised that he allowed them to get the last word.
 - Anatoly Karpov)