The immortal game

Chess has eaten my brain, and the brains of my family, this month, and so it wasn't really a choice to read this. I simply had to.

And, generally, this was a fun, romantic cultural history of chess. It was - like many non-fiction “object memoirs” - a bit hagiographic. Like, I think the author overstated chess's influence over, you know, CIVILIZATION. But, at the same time, I think the author PERFECTLY captured the inner world of chess - what happens in our brains, how it's been used and abused in different cultural contexts. I do wonder how much a total non-chess person would enjoy this. Chess is already super romanticized in our culture (Queen's Gambit blah blah), and the author is definitely deeply in love with the game and that romance, but I mostly enjoyed this as someone who's just started playing obsessively. I felt SEEN by his descriptions of what happens to you when you play, and how some people play (oh god the blunders THE BLUNDERS), and so on.

I think my favorite parts of the book were the ancient chess history - especially the Islamic era stuff, its travel along the Silk Road to Europe, the way the pieces evolved in these cultural contexts (from elephants to knights, from ministers to queens), the way the queen piece was probably based on Holy Roman Empress Adelaide. I also loved learning about the history of chess theory: the romantic era, the strategic era, the hypermodern era, and the new dynamism?

The author also touched on some interesting cognitive aspects of chess as a perfect petri dish for studying cognition. I was very curious to learn more about chess's close relationship with mental illness - the author mentions that there's a theory that it literally drives you crazy, and I KINDA GET THAT. I also really resonated with the quote by one Medieval chess hater about how chess gives you no rest, but just torments your soul. So true, goodness. Look how miserable both the loser AND the winner of the recent World Chess Championships are!

What I did think was missing was: (1) there was zero mention of chess's very weird gender history - that is, it has long been an exclusively male “sport”, and is still extremely skewed. I would have loved some probing of why this has been the case, some discussion of the Polgar sisters, for example. And, (2), there was also no deep investigation of modern scholastic chess - except for a very happy final chapter about NYC's push for chess in public schools. From what I understand, current scholastic chess world is a bit of a shark tank - hyper-competitive and unhappy? That's the vibe I've gotten, but I'd love to learn more. Maybe this book was published before the current scholastic chess boom, so fair enough.

Anyway, if you ever have the (mis)fortune of getting sucked into this game, this is a great overview of its cultural history.