Rating: 
Summary: More Than Chess
Review: As a sometimes chess player, I was fascinated by the history of the development of the game and the role of the queen. However, as a full-time woman, I was even more interested in how the game changed in Europe as royal power came to include women. A unique look at history through a lense that is wider and deeper than I had expected.
Rating: 
Summary: A great thesis... but no proof
Review: Don't get me wrong, I really want to love this book. It is a great thesis: that the chess queen became the most poweful piece on the board during a period in European history when women ruled, in their own right or as regents, throughout Europe. It was such a good thesis, and it makes so much sense, and I think that the proof is somewhere, but I just felt that Ms. Yalom didn't know how to back it up.
She glosses over bits that I thought proved her thesis, but then talks a great deal about things that fly in the face of it! It was quite maddening, because I was really rooting for the thesis. For example, Queen Isabella of Spain was the most powerful woman of this period, and Ms. Yalom discusses how the powerful chess queen was influenced by her... but then she randomly drops the fact that the queen arrived in Spain long after it had achieved its prominence elsewhere!
The book is well written and the research is obviously there... I learned a lot about various very interesting European monarchs that I had never even heard of... which makes Ms. Yalom's lack of proof even more maddening. I think that it's worth a read for the history that it does provide... so long as you keep in mind that you might find that the history does not prove the thesis.
Rating:
Summary: The Queens Have the Power
Review: Even if you know little about chess, you know that since the object of the game is to take an opponent's king, the king is the key to the game and properly considered the most important piece; but also, the king is a weak piece, much less able to move than the most powerful piece on the board, the queen, who can move in eight directions as far as a blocking piece or the edge of the board will allow. The rules of chess are all in standard form now, but they weren't always, and the queen used to be far weaker (or even nonexistent). In _Birth of the Chess Queen: A History_ (HarperCollins), Marilyn Yalom takes a look at a most peculiar coup d'etat. Her contention, which is entertaining and credible even though it may never be proved, is that the rise of the queen in chess is linked to the rise of historic warrior queens, to the cult of the Virgin Mary, and to the then-new tradition of courtly love. She has produced a rich history not only of a chess piece and the game itself, but of the evolution of female power.
The first literary mention of chess comes from Persia, around 600 CE, but the Persians had taken the essentials of the game from India. There was no queen on these chessboards. What was to be her square was occupied by the vizier, the advisor to the king. He was the weakest piece on the board, moving only diagonally and merely one square at a time. Around 1000 CE, there were the first European mentions of a queen instead of a vizier; perhaps this was a recognition of who it was that really had the king's ear. By the 1500s, people were playing "lady's chess" or "queen's chess," with the queen acquiring the extensive moves that she has retained ever since. As far as can be known, the powerful queen arose in southern Europe, and may reflect that aristocratic women in that region had more power than in northern Europe; they could inherit land and become the rulers of the land, for instance. The move made the game much faster and more complex, but churchmen objected in particular to the prospect of a pawn changing to a queen by reaching the far rank. Not only did this involve an unnatural change of sex, but it might be that there could thus result two (or more) queens on the board. The original rules said that changing to a queen could only happen if the original queen had been captured. This would avoid turning the king into a bigamist. Arab players, with viziers instead of queens, suffered no such qualms.
Simultaneous with the queen's rise were examples of actual queens wielding real power. There are different obscure ones whose stories are told here, but familiar to many will be Queen Isabella who as "a militant queen more powerful than her husband" might have made more acceptable the idea of a powerful queen on the chess board. Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth I may have performed the same symbolic function. (Isabella also indirectly spread "queen's chess" all over Europe by expelling the Jews from Spain in 1492; Spain had been a center for the new form of the game.) Much later came Catherine the Great of Russia, and in Russia, the chess vizier was edged out by the queen only around the same time. This is the sort of obscure and fascinating information, with judicious speculation, that may be found throughout Yalom's book. Chess, politics, and history are here combined in a spirit of an intellectual entertainment which is in perfect accord with the game itself.
Rating:
Summary: living history
Review: I have read the History of the Chess Queen with much interest and pleasure. I'ts one of the best non-fiction reads of the year. It's one of those books which elucidates something that has always been dimly perceived but never clearly and elaborated upon. The language is sprightly and the author is obviously devoted to communicating and edifying, not to impress the reader with her great scholarly research.
Somehow the book gives me a whole new perspective on the game of chess, a game that is fifteen hundred years old and has changed in response to changes in culture and especially in relationship to the edifice of queenship. The author goes as far as she can in making connections between the history of the chess queen during the middle ages and the society in which she was born. But she never goes beyond the facts, and we are left with a judicious assessment of how the chess queen reflected the growing power of queenship from around the year 1000 when the queen came to be born, and on to the the year 1500 when the chess queen became most powerful piece. This is history at its best!
Rating:
Summary: Girl's rule is the idea
Review: I read this book because it was recommend by The New York Times for the best of summer reading. I think it can be read and enjoyed in any season by lovers of chess and lovers of history. It tells the story of how the chess queen was born and came to power in relation to the real-life history of queens. A fascinating, original and well-told story. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the relation of the chess queen to the Virgin Mary and the cult of romantic love - two cultural movements that appeared and developed simultaneously with the coming to power of the chess queen. And I also enjoyed learning that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all played together in the courts of Spain before the Muslims and Jews were ejected from that country during the inquisition. Isabella may be remembered for the discovery of America as well as the inspiration for the modern all-powerful chess queen, but she has much to answer for along the lines of religious tolerance!
Rating:
Summary: Book and Author Praised in London
Review: I was recently in London and had the great pleasure of hearing Marilyn Yalom speak at the British Museum on her book "Birth of the Chess Queen." She was invited by the British Museum medieval curator who lavishly praised her book during his introduction to her talk. Thus I was shocked by the uninformed Amazon reviewer from London questioning Yalom's scholarship. It seems as if the British chess crowd (all male) can't accept the idea of a woman invading their territory, and especially one advancing the theory that the chess queen was put on the board because of living queens and the growth of female power. The book is an extraordinarily accomplished feat of scholarship and of writing. Its prose is sparkling and I doubt if I will ever pick up a chess queen without thinking of how it came to be born and how it matured into the powerful force it is today.`
Rating: 
Summary: Wishful thinking
Review: It's an oddity of modern chess that the most powerful piece is the queen, whose role in real life was (and still is) fairly secondary (though there are a few exceptions).
In the old Indian and Arabic chess the most powerful piece was the rukh or chariot, and that made sense because the chariot was one of the most mobile elements in the army (mounted horsemen being the other notably mobile element.
The fact is that we have absolutely no evidence as to how or why the modern verson of the game evolved (except the date: around the 1490s). Historian Richard Eales said this in 'Chess: the history of a game' (Batsford 1985):
"It is certainly a striking fact that the dominant piece in the new chess should be the queen, the only one with a female name, but no conceivable change in fifteenth-century history can explain it. The suggestion that the powerful chess queen was modelled on some dominant female personage... is no more than wishful thinking, unless some evidence to support it can be discovered." (p77)
Although Marilyn Yalom places queenly biography next to elements of chess history, none of it counts as evidence. The central theme of her book is therefore a sham. Buy the book for the pictures, if at all (and even then some of the captions are open to question, and the photos are not referenced).
Rating:
Summary: More Than Chess
Review: This book could have been condensed into one chapter of chess queens found in European writings and museum pieces. The rest is superficial people magazine blurbs about reigning queens or consorts of the period. The theory is not well presented or supported that the powers of the chess queen developed from any historical queen. There just is too much feminist bias that the game piece derived from equally powerful female monarchs. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the author forgot she was writing about chess or chess history. The categorization of paintings or writings about chess from medieval times is incomplete for this book to be considered truly scholarly. The book is also too brief to be an adequate reference for medieval queens. At the end of the book, I found myself wondering still how the chess queen entered the game and how it transformed the game. I hope a true chess enthusiast will write another book from a chess perspective without any of the ideological baggage.
Rating: 
Summary: too little about chess
Review: This book could have been condensed into one chapter of chess queens found in European writings and museum pieces. The rest is superficial people magazine blurbs about reigning queens or consorts of the period. The theory is not well presented or supported that the powers of the chess queen developed from any historical queen. There just is too much feminist bias that the game piece derived from equally powerful female monarchs. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the author forgot she was writing about chess or chess history. The categorization of paintings or writings about chess from medieval times is incomplete for this book to be considered truly scholarly. The book is also too brief to be an adequate reference for medieval queens. At the end of the book, I found myself wondering still how the chess queen entered the game and how it transformed the game. I hope a true chess enthusiast will write another book from a chess perspective without any of the ideological baggage.
Rating:
Summary: Not Too Bad; Not Too Good
Review: Yalom advances an interesting thesis: the development of the power of the chess Queen was directly influenced by powerful women (queens and nobles) in Western Europe. However, she does not adequately support her thesis.Essentially this book is historical example after example of women in Medieval Europe who held and exercised well the reins of power. Yalom then shows a few pictures; cites a few poems and manuscripts; and eventually says that because these women were powerful that chess playing society decided to make the queen more powerful. Yalom ignores the most compelling reason for the development of the chess queen's power: the rise of the middle class. There was no queen when the Arabs played chess; instead there was a vizier--a weak piece at best. Chess was also an extremely slow game, often taking days to play. It was played by the upper classes. It is quite natural that Western players would eventually replace the vizier with the Queen. Moreover, it is worth noting that as we see a rise in the middle class--many wanting to mirror the nobility in manners and tastes--that they, too, would play chess. But they needed a faster game, and during this time we see rapid changes in chess rules, and a steady increase in the Queen's power (bishop, too). The development was mainly for speed. It is also of interest that Yalom so strongly claims that it was the rise of powerful women that caused the chess Queen to develop as it did, but then she ignores that line of thinking with other pieces. For example, the Bishop also gained in power during this time, but in society at large we see during this time the erosion of church power in secular affairs. If Yalom's thesis hold's true for the chess Queen, then applied to the Bishop we should see that piece losing power. In short, although well written, the book fails to convince unless you already buy into Yalom's interpretation. On the plus side: 1. Book is a joy to hold; well produced; well constructed; well designed; easy font to read. 2. Excellent photographs of chess pieces; some not previously published (not that I've seen). 3. Some very interesting historical vignettes of female rulers. 4. Some insights into chess and polite society during the Middle Ages and beyond. Drawbacks: 1. Unsupported thesis. 2. Assumption of being correct. Yalom is not trying to argue; rather, she is preaching to the choir.
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