Book Notice: Linder & Linder's *Max Euwe: 5th World Chess Champion*
Monday, May 29, 2017 at 7:34PM Isaak and Vladimir Linder, Max Euwe: 5th World Chess Champion. (Russell Enterprises, 2017.) Foreword by Andy Soltis, Game Annotations by Karsten Mueller. 238 pp., $24.95. Reviewed by Dennis Monokroussos.
Isaak and Vladimir Linder, father and son, produced a massive work in Russian in 2001 covering all the world chess champions from Wilhelm Steinitz through then-champ Vladimir Kramnik. Russell Enterprises arranged to present the book's contents in English, divided into separate volumes for each champion, and now we have the fifth volume in the series. The biographical material and game selection is due to the Linders, but a happy bonus of the English translation is that German GM Karsten Mueller has contributed annotations to the games.
This volume's subject is the Dutchman Max Euwe (1901-1981; world champion from 1935-37), who was also a Ph.D. in mathematics (at the age of 24) and a math teacher by profession, but later the President of FIDE. He was also a noted theoretician and chess author, and in his 50s was involved for a time with computer chess.
As with previous volumes (see my earlier reviews of the Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine books) in the series, the book has an unusual encyclopedia-style format, though it comes closer to the traditional life-and-games model than the earlier works.
Chapter 1 offers a very short biography of sorts, but it jumps over almost his entire chess career. That is covered by the 145-page second chapter, which as noted before is more of a mini-encyclopedia. After short summaries of his overall match and tournament results, the Linders begin with a section called "Hastings Tournaments", covering Euwe's participation in the 1930/31 and 1934/35 events, both of which he won. Then there's a similar section on Amsterdam tournaments, followed by a double entry: one on Richard Reti, and then on a Reti-Euwe match played in 1920. (In general, the events are covered in chronological order, but with exceptions like the Amsterdam tournaments noted above.) In the case of all the match opponents listed, a separate entry is given for the opponent himself: Reti, Geza Maroczy, Edgard Colle, Alexander Alekhine, Efim Bogoljubow, Salo Landau, Jose Raul Capablanca, Salo Flohr, Rudolf Spielmann, and Paul Keres. This continues through the 1948 World Championship Match-Tournament, and then concludes with entries on Johannes Donner, Beverwijk tournaments, and correspondence chess.
Chapter 3 is a hodgepodge collected under the heading "Chess - Play and Novelties". This includes a number of his most famous games, some combinations and compositions, some of his aphorisms, and more. (Tartakower he's not, but he manages at least one memorable line with this bittersweet comment: "Unfortunately, success, like everything else in the world, must pass.")
Chapter 4, "Writer and Journalist", is very short. Euwe was a prolific author, claiming to have written "50 or 60 [books], maybe even more" when asked in 1974 by IM Anthony Saidy's question how many books he had written. The Linders limit their focus to short synopses of four books: Practical Chess Lessons (1927-1928), Course of Chess Lectures (excerpted from the previous book), Strategy and Tactics in Chess (1935), and Judgment and Planning in Chess (1952).
Finally, chapter 5, "Timeless", is mostly a series of reminiscences and evaluations of Euwe by his fellow champions, along with a brief mention of books about Euwe.
There are 104 complete games (almost but not all of them involving Euwe, and almost all are well-annotated), along with four composed positions. So the book is worthwhile as both a chess biography as well as a chess biography. While I am ambivalent about the encyclopedia approach, which chops up Euwe's career into a series of discrete units rather than drawing out a narrative in which we feel the subject's ups and downs through the seasons of his chess career and his life as a whole, the book is nonetheless a valuable addition to the rather limited literature on Euwe available in English.
Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in chess history, and warmly recommended to those whose interest in chess isn't limited to the purely utilitarian pursuit of this week's chess opening theory.
Update: Trust, but verify. While I think the book is a contribution to chess literature, the authors - and/or the translator and editor - are somewhat careless. (See the review on this page.) The Linders of course knew that Capablanca didn't go undefeated for 10 years after losing to Reti in New York 1924, and in their book (section of their book) on Capablanca (on page 98) they write this: "The chess public had come to believe that Capablanca lost no games at all - indeed, in the ten years since St. Petersburg [in 1914] he had lost only one!"
The error about Bad Kissingen is an odd one. The Linders list both Alekhine and Lasker as players who participated in Bad Kissingen (p. 77), but my suspicion when reading the Amazon review was that they played there in a different year; after all, the Linders' give a crosstable of the tournament (p. 78) and neither Alekhine nor Lasker is listed. As it turns out, however, a search of the Mega Database doesn't show Alekhine or Lasker participating in any Bad Kissingen event, so even if my attempt at a charitable hypothesis is correct, the Linders (assuming correct translation/editing) still made an error.
I'm not sure that we should be bothered by the two remaining errors. Remember that the original was a 1000-page monster published in 2001, which means it was probably out of their hands at some point in 2000. Writing this book wouldn't have been the work of a few days, but of a few years, and if they wrote it in anything approaching chronological order they would have been dependent on the databases of the mid-to-late 1990s. The databases of 2017 aren't merely better than their counterparts of 20 years ago thanks to the games played since then, but also because of older games having been found, mis-entered games having been corrected, spurious games having been removed, and so on.
So: errare humanum est, as usual. I think the Amazon reviewer's conclusion is extremely overblown, but even so historians in particular ought to be especially careful in getting the facts right. It's almost impossible to write anything long and substantial without making any errors, but it's important to try. Russell Enterprises has employed Taylor Kingston before for his skills as an eagle-eyed researcher; perhaps they should do so again (or find someone else of his ilk) to check and correct the Linders' errors for future books in the series.
Linder, Max Euwe in Book Reviews
Reader Comments (6)
Another error that I came across in a facebook post:
"The authors state Euwe defeated the first correspondence world champion M Napolitano. Napolitano was never world champion. He was a fine player and finished 3rd, 7th and 5th in the first three championships. C J S Purdy won the first championship and a mistake like this makes you wonder about the rest of the book."
[DM: Hmm...that one definitely can't be blamed on a database. I may have to do a second review after some serious fact-checking, if I can find the time for it.]
As far as "fact-checking", if you kindly look at the www.serverchess.com website, you will find crosstables of the first several world correspondence chess championships---and Napolitano did not take first place in any of them, as Brian Karen points out.
[DM: Or Wikipedia, or ICCF. So I'm not sure why you're pointing it out.]
You may have a point about ICCF, but Wikipedia ?! I take a lot of things on that with a large grain of salt.
[DM: On certain really broad topics, yes, especially when it's on a debated issue, some salt is useful. But when it comes to basic factual information it's fine - and besides, they provide links in most cases (including this one) so you can check for yourself.]
I am the author of one of the reviews you quote. In the interest of space on Amazon, I only sampled the errors I found. There were many others.
It states the Reti-Euwe 1920 match took place "shortly after" the Amsterdam tournament. In fact, it took place before.
It says "By 1941 [Bogo] was facing an ex-world champion who had crushed Alekhine four years before." That would have been 6 years, and a match win by the odd point is hardly a crush (although this is probably sloppy translation, it's still worth mentioning in a review of the English edition).
[DM: Agreed, probably a bad translation. The error might have gone in the opposite direction - perhaps it was supposed to read "...had been crushed by Alekhine four years before."
It states the Keres-Euwe match was played to 6 wins, which can't be correct, or the match would have ended when Keres scored his 6th win.
[DM: This is not so clear. Keres won the match despite losing the last game, so even if the Linders are wrong the match still continued after the winner was determined. I checked Münninghoff's biography of Euwe to see what he said about the match, and found this potentially unclear paragraph on p. 229: "[After giving the result of each of the first 12 games, one at a time.] For those who haven't kept up, the score is now 7-5 for Keres: match point for the Estonian grandmaster. this is followed by a solid draw in game 13 (which yields Keres the fattest VARA [DM: the sponsor] envelope), and finally (it is mid-January 1940 now) by a magnificent win for Euwe, which fixes the final score at the traditional one-point difference (7 1/2-6 1/2) at Euwe's expense." A guess, and it's only a guess: the Linders saw this passage and didn't know tennis (or volleyball), and assumed "match point" meant not that the next score in the leader's favor would win the match, but that it had already been won. If so, then given that the match went 14 games and Keres had won with 7 points, it must have been by satisfying a first-to-six-wins condition.]
It mentions Euwe's three tournaments as world champion. In fact, it was four, as stated elsewhere in the book.
[DM: That is one of the oddities of the book, that they get a fact right in one place and wrong in another. This was noted in earlier discussions of the book, and comes up again below.]
Just a nitpick, but they spell Tylor's name as Tyler.
[DM: Since it's a translation, the fault may not be the Linders'.]
It mentions Botvinnik as world champion (1948, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1963). What do those dates mean? Not matches he won, since he lost in 1957, 1960 and 1963. But not matches he played either, since 1951 and 1954 are missing.
[DM: Could this be some sort of lost-in-translation (or bad editing) issue? Those numbers work if you put dashes between them: 1948-1957, 1958-1960, and 1961-1963. If someone competent in Russian has the original work and can check some of these things, it would be much appreciated.]
Overlooks Leningrad 1934 in discussing Botvinnik-Euwe games.
[DM: In some sense. I guess you're referring to the sentence starting at the end of the first column on page 160: "Beginning with Hastings in 1934-1935 and until 1946, they had played in five international tournaments, and the result was +2 -0 =4 in Euwe's favor." They then give Euwe's win from round 12 of AVRO 1938. But they don't "discuss" all of their pre-1948 games, and they get the number of pre-1948 tournaments and the score correct. Where they goof is in using Hastings as the starting point, as the Leningrad tournament started about four months earlier. Once again, it's not that they ignore the tournament altogether: the event is covered on pp. 114-116 of the book, and the Botvinnik-Euwe game from Leningrad is mentioned on both pages 115 and 116.]
States Znosko-Borovsky was 45 at Zaandam 1946, when he was actually 61.
[DM: In fact, Euwe was 45 at the time of the tournament, so that may be what they meant - or what they wrote but an editor/translator goofed up on. At least that was my thought, until I read the offending paragraph on page 165, where they follow up the mistake about Znosko-Borovsky by stating that Euwe was 42. Oh well.]
Discusses in the text Euwe's only win (against Smyslov) in the 1948 tournament, but analyzes a Smyslov win from an earlier round.
[DM: Yep. It's a very interesting game, but it's not the one they claim it is! Very sloppy.]
So: errare humanum est, as usual. I think the Amazon reviewer's conclusion is extremely overblown, but even so historians in particular ought to be especially careful in getting the facts right.
Really, only historians have a special responsibility to get facts right? So we are just supposed smile and grin while eating the "factual" drivel that chess authors such as [DM: snip, snip, and snip - I'm not interested in inviting authors to file libel suits against this blog, especially in the absence of substantiating evidence] and way too many others serve up?
[DM: Seriously? To say that "historians in particular ought to be especially careful" doesn't mean that facts shouldn't matter to anyone else, but that historians have a special responsibility to be especially careful. If a kid is writing a biography on an athlete for a class paper, it's okay for him to look up the person's career stats on Wikipedia and be done with it. If a sports statistician or a biographer is writing about the athlete, it's more important to look up primary sources, double-check one's work, etc. If some friends ask me what the weather will be like for our trip, a check of an internet source or two should suffice; if a meteorologist is preparing a report, his task is to look at various models and maybe run some himself, and to use other specialized high-tech tools. The level of precision needed and research required differs based on need, relevance, and one's professional competence and responsibilities.]
Here's an idea, radical though it may appear to be: Any and every author writing on any topic dealing with factual information "ought to be especially careful in getting the facts right".
[DM: Of course one should take basic care - no one is denying that. This isn't radical, and nothing I said should suggest otherwise. But being "especially careful" is ambiguous, for the reasons given in the preceding reply. What I don't really understand, frankly, is the point of this reply. The Linders, unless the fault was due to translators and/or editors, dropped the ball and appear to have been more careless than one would expect from "normal" human error. The only thing I'm sticking up for is that the book doesn't suddenly lose its value as a result of these errors. That doesn't exonerate them or excuse others who would do shabby or careless work. Russell Enterprises should post an errata page on their website and, if it's feasible, make corrections in a second printing. But for chess players who want to know about Euwe, his games, and the chess world at that time, this book is still a useful resource, despite its serious flaws.
One last clarification: there are different standards by which we can evaluate the book. Is it a good work of chess history? No - but I wasn't reviewing the book for historians. I was trying to evaluate whether this would be a good book for the casual chess fan who doesn't know much about Euwe or especially his chess. To that end, the book is useful. As a work of history, it's obviously sloppy - too sloppy - but even as a historical work it could have value if the Linders' access to Soviet and former Soviet sources let them introduce information and stories that were previously unknown in the West.]
@ Richard Rose: An additional thought. Let's distinguish between basic facts and more subtle and sophisticated tasks for the historical writer. I certainly agree that anyone writing on Euwe should, for instance, get his birth and death years right, along with the years of his world championship reign. That isn't something that's "especially" the task of the historian. Right?
Basically, yes. They are elementary facts which are widely accessible, and one should get them right. But let's say I'm writing an article about Euwe's chess for a (non-Dutch!) chess magazine, and while writing his dates commit a typo and come up with "1901-1980". (Or maybe age is starting to take its toll, and while I've rightly trusted my memory of dates for a long time a little bit of mental slippage has started to seep in.) I spend hours working on my analysis of his games and get everything as right as my chess abilities and my computer-savvy permit with my hardware and software, and do work that gets complimented even by IMs and GMs. Is my article garbage because I goofed up Euwe's dates and my editor didn't catch it either?
No, and indeed, obviously not. This sort of thing happens all the time, unfortunately, and that's why publications write corrections. But it's also not as important as it would be for a historian to make such an error. I care about facts and history, but as a practical player focusing on chess content, my editorial energies are and ought to be on the chess. Conversely, while a historian should do what he can to make sure that his analysis is competent when he dabbles in that realm, his primary concern is the biographical and historical material, and to offer insight into the person's life and character. If his notes consist of citations from players of the time, even if their analysis wasn't very good (even in its own right, never mind in the hands of someone checking with contemporary computers), that's fine by me. The biographer isn't primarily focused on chess truth in his writing, at least not insofar as he is writing as a historian or biographer.
This doesn't mean that "anything goes" when I writer addresses matters outside his particular focus, only that standards vary with context. If Einstein gave the wrong year for a colleague's paper when writing his paper on Special Relativity, it is a little bit of a problem, to the degree that he's inconveniencing researchers who want to follow up on that lead. But in a bigger sense, who cares? Likewise, if someone writing a work of fiction which doesn't purport to have any scientific value mistypes a symbol from a long and complicated equation Einstein once wrote, it's not very important. It would have been better if they or their editors had double or tripled-checked it, certainly. It shows respect for physics and physicists. But the person may not have been deliberately careless, and it doesn't affect the quality of the story in its own right.