Book Notice: Linder & Linder's *Max Euwe: 5th World Chess Champion*
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.