What do you think?
Rate this book
The Stories, Games, and Intrigues of Capablanca and Alekhine
- GenresChess
440 pages, Hardcover
Published September 15, 2025
1 person is currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 7, 2026
Biography, history and chess.
I’ve reviewed a few chess-related books for which chess knowledge isn’t particularly important. This isn’t one of them.
But if you do play, and your rating on chess.com is 800+ you’ll find this very accessible and it will help you improve, if that’s what you want to do. In any case, it’s a fun read.
Along with the games so crisply analysed, Siles writes a portrait of two of the most fascinating and contrasting champions in chess history - the charming, handsome Capablanca, and the driven, cruel Alekhine.
José Capablanca became world champion in 1921.
There were two previous official world champions before Capa: Steinitz and Lasker. Each of them fought off multiple challengers before being dethroned. Neither of them had the aura of invincibility that Capa had, who lost to his first challenger, Alekhine. Go figure.
While people with planet-sized brains were squaring off over 64 squares and 32 pieces, the world was going to hell in a hand basket.
Siles touches on this, not as a historian, but just to keep it real.
The Great War erupted with Capa fairly safe, while Alekhine was lucky to escape with his life from revolutionary Russia.
There is a wonderful scene in The General, by Buster Keaton, where protagonists are fighting up and down a moving locomotive while, in the background, the decisive battle of the American civil war is taking place.
The games Siles chooses for us occur with the backdrop of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, WWII and the rise of the Soviet empire.
This is a complicated book. Deeply humane and loving. Which is kind of a weird thing to say, I guess, but I’m reminded of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ principle. Or even Hannibal Lecter - just see everything for what it is.
Most chess books are ‘best games of…’ or ‘win at chess’. This is neither. And so much better for it.
Heartily recommended.
Some chess-related books that are great reads for players and non-players:
**Queens Gambit,** Walter Tevis (he also wrote The Hustler and Color of Money)
**Searching for Bobby Fischer,** Fred Waitzkin (a study of a parent struggling with understanding his son and asking the question - my son is very good at this thing, but is this thing very good for my son?)
**Chess Queens,** Jennifer Shahade (the best female players and their stories of how they survived, thrived or not.
**Birth of the Chess Queen,** Marilyn Yalom (my favourite. A cultural history of chess and how the queen became such hot stuff)
I’ve reviewed a few chess-related books for which chess knowledge isn’t particularly important. This isn’t one of them.
But if you do play, and your rating on chess.com is 800+ you’ll find this very accessible and it will help you improve, if that’s what you want to do. In any case, it’s a fun read.
Along with the games so crisply analysed, Siles writes a portrait of two of the most fascinating and contrasting champions in chess history - the charming, handsome Capablanca, and the driven, cruel Alekhine.
José Capablanca became world champion in 1921.
There were two previous official world champions before Capa: Steinitz and Lasker. Each of them fought off multiple challengers before being dethroned. Neither of them had the aura of invincibility that Capa had, who lost to his first challenger, Alekhine. Go figure.
While people with planet-sized brains were squaring off over 64 squares and 32 pieces, the world was going to hell in a hand basket.
Siles touches on this, not as a historian, but just to keep it real.
The Great War erupted with Capa fairly safe, while Alekhine was lucky to escape with his life from revolutionary Russia.
There is a wonderful scene in The General, by Buster Keaton, where protagonists are fighting up and down a moving locomotive while, in the background, the decisive battle of the American civil war is taking place.
The games Siles chooses for us occur with the backdrop of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, WWII and the rise of the Soviet empire.
This is a complicated book. Deeply humane and loving. Which is kind of a weird thing to say, I guess, but I’m reminded of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ principle. Or even Hannibal Lecter - just see everything for what it is.
Most chess books are ‘best games of…’ or ‘win at chess’. This is neither. And so much better for it.
Heartily recommended.
Some chess-related books that are great reads for players and non-players:
**Queens Gambit,** Walter Tevis (he also wrote The Hustler and Color of Money)
**Searching for Bobby Fischer,** Fred Waitzkin (a study of a parent struggling with understanding his son and asking the question - my son is very good at this thing, but is this thing very good for my son?)
**Chess Queens,** Jennifer Shahade (the best female players and their stories of how they survived, thrived or not.
**Birth of the Chess Queen,** Marilyn Yalom (my favourite. A cultural history of chess and how the queen became such hot stuff)
Displaying 1 of 1 review