Emanuel Lasker, by Isaak and Vladimir Linder: A Review
Sunday, August 8, 2010 at 6:13PM Isaak and Vladimir Linder, Emanuel Lasker: 2nd World Chess Champion (Foreword by Andy Soltis, Game Annotations by Karsten Müller. (Russell Enterprises 2010.) 264 pp. $24.95.
This is by the same authors as the recently reviewed Capablanca volume, but while the first book was a solid, workmanlike effort but not really so special, the Lasker volume makes a significant contribution to the chess world. First of all, there isn’t much that’s available in English on Emanuel Lasker. There’s the J. Hannak hagiography originally published in 1959, Kasparov’s chapter in volume 1 of My Great Predecessors (2003) and then in 2005 Soltis’s Why Lasker Matters presents 100 of the second world champion’s games, but without any biographical material. So there’s a huge gap in the literature, and considering that Lasker was world champion for 27 years and continued to compete at the highest level into his mid-to-late 60s, he’s a worthy figure.
Additionally, he lived a very interesting life: he obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics, wrote broadly philosophical material, was an expert in other games like bridge and even wrote a play. He was born in Germany but also lived for significant periods in England, Russian and the United States.
So the Linders have a very rich subject for their work, and they handle it in a very interesting way. Rather than giving a traditional chronology of his life, interspersed with accounts of his matches and tournaments, they present a series of encyclopedia-like chapters.
Chapter 1, “Life”, begins as one might expect with a section called “Childhood and Adolescence”. But that’s where business as usual comes to a screeching halt. The next section is “Family”, then “Personality”, “Mathematician”, “Teacher”, “Dissertation”, “Philosopher”, “Einstein and Lasker”, “Politics”, “Curiosities”, “Humor”, “England”, “Holland”, “Russia” and “USA”. In general the narrative follows a chronological thread, but not always.
So where’s the chess? It’s mostly in the very long chapter 2, which might be thought of as its own book. It is labeled “Matches, Tournaments and Opponents”, and that’s just what it is. It starts with an entry on Alekhine, then “Berlin Tournaments, 1890, 1918”, “Bird”, “Bird-Lasker Matches, 1890, 1892”, and so on, all the way to the letter Z (for Zürich 1934). When a subsection is devoted to a player, that person gets his own mini-bio and sometimes the accompanying game(s) doesn’t feature Lasker! It’s quite unusual for a chess biography, but it presents a fascinating picture of the chess world around Lasker during his career.
Many of us have a pretty good sense of the players he faced in world championship matches and after losing the title, but many of his early opponents are just names to us. So in addition to telling us a lot about Lasker, we get a broader education thrown in for free.
Within the chapter is a mini-chapter, “Matches”, which is dominated by a sub-mini-chapter, Matches for the World Championship. It’s well-done, and I should add that these entries don’t replace the entries on the match opponents. (That is, Capablanca has his own entry, and then there’s the further section on the Capablanca-Lasker match.)
Chapter 3, “Chess Works – His Games and Discoveries”, is another hodge-podge. Sections include Aesthetics, Aphorisms, Endgame Studies, Losses, Neo-Romanticism and Psychology.
Chapter 4, “Writer and Journalist”, gives a quick run-through of his efforts as a chess journalist and author, and the final chapter, “Impervious to Time”, briefly discusses his final years and death, books and other memorials to his life and work, and presents a series of quotations from other champions about Lasker. (It’s the sort of thing Kasparov does throughout My Great Predecessors, at the end of each champion’s biography, but he got the idea from the Linders and not the other way around.) The book then concludes with a series of indexes.
As for annotated games, while this work doesn’t replace Soltis’s Why Lasker Matters, the chess content isn’t trivial. There are 82 games and game fragments (mostly games), and they are annotated by German GM Karsten Müller. Sometimes the analysis is rather light, but on the whole the games are covered quite well.
I really liked this book, and can heartily recommend it to chess fans of all sorts.
(Purchasing info here.)
Lasker in Book Reviews
Reader Comments (7)
Dennis, have you read the Forster, Hansen and Negele book? My German is rusty, and it's hard going, but it seems excellent. (and the physical quality is obviously top notch.)
If you have both, any reason to get this one? I do have "Why Lasker Matters".
Just curious, since Lasker's games are probably my favorites.
MikeO, I don't have the Forster et al
doorstopbook, though I probably would if my German were up to speed. But that's a huge and expensive volume; this is a fine everyday book for the "regular" chess fan.Gotcha, thanks Dennis.
Just looked it up. $150 for the Forster tome from one site, 114 Euros from another. (Plus shipping.) Eek. Still, as I said, if my German were up to snuff, I'd get it.
I think I paid $150 for it, but for me it was sort of a must buy. (I love high quality Chess books, and Lasker is probably my favorite player.) It's expensive, but it's also the sort of book you rarely see anymore -- it's like a book from the 19th century.
They even got Kortchnoi to analyze a couple of Lasker's games, which is appropriate.
I'm really glad it exists. Lasker is one of the really interesting figures in Chess history, and there was really no high class and well researched book on him until this one.
But the one you review above looks really good for the more casual fans. :)
For those who like digging around old book stores or e-bay I remember that Fred Reinfeld and Ruben Fine did a book(s) on Laskers career back in the 1930's called Lasker's Chess Career
[DM: The new book is way better than that. Get this book and Soltis's and let the other one fade into obscurity.]
What was the cause of Lasker's death? Hannak just mention "his illness.
Also, according to Hannak Marta was at his side when he passed, but other authors put the dead of Martha in 1939. Who is wrong?