Amos Burn: A Chess Biography

Rating:
Summary: chess career in depth
Review: These days Amos Burn is remembered as a somewhat dour and obscure player who was famous for losing a couple of brevities to more famous players like Frank Marshall. Burn had a defensive/positional approach to chess and was by all reports quite reserved and taciturn. So what incentive would there be to catalogue his chess career in such great detail. The secret with this book is that it brings Burn to life within the context of his times and historical setting (1870s to 1920s). The players, the tournaments, the controversies are analysed in at times great detail, and are overall very interesting and holds the reader's attention throughout. The various elements (games, notes, pictures, tournament tables, and background details) are superbly presented to enable the reader to drop in and out (you will not be able to digest the material in one sitting) without getting lost in the enormous detail. This is a desert island book par excellence and will provide interesting reading for years. The closest comparison is the excellent book on Alekhine by Skinner and Verhoeven (same publishers). If you think that it is the biggest chess book on the planet, the Burn book is in fact bigger. It is not just the size, but that it takes chess biography/game collections to a higher level. I thought that this would be impossible as the Alekhine book is a masterpiece (it's only weakness is the absence of photos - has only one - the Burn book has hundreds). The games are a comprehensive collection, as unlike Alekhine, Burn did not tend to play a lot of simultaneous and blindfold games, with the inevitable variablity in quality. The games therefore are uniformly good, but not quite reaching Alekhine's genius (both highs and lows). The annotations are outstanding, both compemtorary and brought up to date by Forster (who is a strong player himself). Any serious student of chess will be richly rewarded. Although quite expensive, the book contains enormous value and will definately become a classic. It has the expected excellent McFarland touch (quality paper, library quality binding, high quality layout and general presentation, etc) and despite its size (over 950 pages)is unlikely to fall apart. I believe that this book sets a new challenge for chess authors and is quite likely to be the best book of its type ever written. Even Edward Winter, one of the supreme chess authors, has in a recent review admitted that this is the book that he would have liked to have written. I cannot wait for Forster to turn his mind to Lasker or indeed any of the other world champions who richly deserve this treatment. Buy this book, you will not regret it.
Walter Hart, Burra Creek, Australia