Two Interesting Books
While browsing around on Amazon a couple of days ago, a couple of chess books popped up in the "recommended for you" list. Both are about Soviet grandmasters, and neither features any chess (or any to speak of).
The first that showed up was Team Tal: An Inside Story, by Valentin Kirillov. It's a short book that looks like a collection of vignettes about the late great Mikhail Tal, and it looks like a nice book for his fans.
The second book is about David Bronstein, another great player who came very close to becoming the world champion, but unlike Tal, he didn't succeed in doing so. While Bronstein was a brilliant player who lived a fascinating life, one could detect sadness and a touch of bitterness in his later works (e.g. Secret Notes). But in Genna Sosonko's The Rise and Fall of David Bronstein, it seems that the bitterness was almost all-consuming, at least from his late middle age onward. It's hard to tell from the excerpt Amazon makes available how pervasive Bronstein's negativity is in the text, so if any of you have read the book, please offer your thoughts about it in the comments. (Likewise about the Tal book, if you've read that one.)
At any rate, both books look interesting, at least to middle-agers like me who grew up at a time when Tal and Bronstein were chess heroes to many young players.
Reader Comments (1)
Perhaps a bit early to comment on Sosonko's 'Bronstein' as I've only begun reading it recently. But so far it is up to the standard of Sosonko's other work, in other words, beautifully written and with detailed insights. In Sosonko's hands the bitterness of Bronstein comes across to the reader as a literary pleasure, I suppose it's a kind of 'Schadenfreude' on the part of the reader. (Since a book on Tal is also mentioned, it occurs to me that the only area where Sosonko has been somewhat overpraised is in his writings on Tal, which to me are overblown and verging on the sentimental. I agree with your assessment of Bronstein's 'Secret Notes': the whining tone made it unreadable.) A minor irritant in the Sosonko book is that, early on, Bronstein is constantly referred to as 'Davy'. Not quite sure why that is so irritating!
[DM: Sosonko is a fine writer, if a bit of a sentimentalist, as you say in conjunction with his writing on Tal. My worry is that I don't want to read the book and be overwhelmed by Bronstein's negativity. I've long been a fan of his, but to some extent in Secret Notes and apparently to a much greater extent here, a sadder and less agreeable picture emerges. If it pervades the book, I'd rather pass; but if most of the book escapes it and treats Bronstein's life as a more ordinary and tolerable one with the ups and downs we all experience and deal with, I'll be more interested.]