The Immortal Game - A History of Chess
by David Shenk
Anchor, HK$142
'Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer,' says Albert Einstein early in David Shenk's enjoyable The Immortal Game - A History of Chess. Built around the game played in London in 1851 by Adolf Anderssen
and Lionel Kieseritzky (Anderssen won after sacrificing his queen, both rooks and a bishop), Shenk's is a multi-faceted exploration of 'the deep history of chess' entanglement with the human mind'. His previous books are The Forgetting (2001), about Alzheimer's disease, and Data Smog (1997), which discusses the impact of too much information on the health of both the individual and society. The Immortal Game takes in chess as a metaphor, addiction and window on the mind, even its role in the future of humanity. Shenk has an agenda, which is to promote the introduction of the chessboard in classrooms. 'We face in our modern, splintered world not only a crisis in education, but more pointedly a crisis of understanding - of thought and of willingness to engage in thought.' Chess, Shenk says, will help train young brains to cope with the demands of the information age.
