This Crazy World of Chess

by Larry Evans

Fascinating, intriguing, and controversial, the dean of American chess tells the never-before-told machinations and stories of world championship chess and what really goes on behind the scenes of the game at its highest level. If you think that chess and marbles are the only games free from politics, you can scratch that idea. These 101 entertaining dispatches from the front deal with the crazy world of chess ranging from politics, Fischermania (and Fischer's paranoid antics), the real deal behind the deep blue supercomputer that beat Kasparov, to just plain gossip and fun.

Genres: Chess

296 pages, Paperback

First published November 6, 2007

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Larry Melvin Evans, chess grandmaster.

Reviews

[Stewart Tame · Rating 3 out of 5]

A blurb on the cover promises, “After reading this controversial book, you’ll never look at chess the same way again!” Okay. That's fair. I do think the exclamation point oversells it a bit though. And crazy? No more so than any profession or hobby, I think. Pretty much any human endeavor acquires colorful characters and anecdotes over time. It only takes someone with the wit and storytelling abilities to bring them to life in print for the general public. In this case, that person is Larry Evans.

This book is a collection of installments--some of them revised and updated--of Evans’ syndicated newspaper column, “Evans On Chess.” They’re not printed in order of publication, but the dates appear to run from around 2003 to 2006. Instead, they appear to be generally grouped by subject: Bobby Fischer, the politics of FIDE--the international body that keeps track of rankings and stages the international Chess Olympiads, and so on.

One drawback to this approach is, with multiple essays on essentially the same topic in quick succession, repetitive information really leaps out at you. I was honestly getting sick of hearing what a mess FIDE is long before Evans was done with the topic. To be fair, while I do play chess every now and then, it's hardly the life-dominating burning passion that seems to be present in many of Evans’ subjects.

The book seemed to improve for me at around the halfway point, where Evans seems to run out of unifying themes. The columns definitely read better when there's less redundancy from one to the next. There are fascinating interviews, tales of celebrity chess enthusiasts, famous blunders, chess in the movies …

I also must confess that, while Evans includes the move sequences for a number of games, I didn't attempt to play through any of them. I’m definitely not up to the challenge of visualizing them in my head, and was feeling too lazy to haul out the chess set and play through any. If this resulted in diminished enjoyment of the book, so be it.

The truth is, the “controversial” columns are more likely to be of interest only to chess aficionados. If, like me, your interest is more general, you’ll probably appreciate the interviews and anecdotes more. For those, at least, it is recommended!

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a bad book of anecdotes, but the flyleaf sort of distorted the contents of the book.

All of the stories are excerpts from Evans' Chess collumn, and a great deal of the material is redundant-as monthly collumns tend to be-or relates to Evans's apparent vendeta against FIDE (the world governing body of chess.)

The other anecdotes, including an extended amount of (somewhat redundant) biographical material on Bobby Fischer, were worth reading.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of Evans' columns from the early 2000s... they try to hype it as some sort of tell-all book, but is just a slapdash collection of his later writing.. .there are few older columns that are reprinted from the 50s and 60s... one about some American players touring Russia during Kruschev's era was pretty interesting... look, anything about chess history will likely get at least 3 stars from me, but that's about it in this case.

[Quoc nguyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of articles, poorly/lazily edited. Kept reading long articles about the same thing over and over again. Made the mistake of reading through them anyway because I'm neurotic about maybe missing something interesting--but that didn't happen. But there was some interesting stuff buried in there. And Evans' main arguments against FIDE--the subject of the redundant articles--are sound.