My Review of The Kings of New York

My review of Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York is now online at ChessCafe. The review begins:

"Wander over to the book and equipment stall of any national chess tournament and you’ll find hundreds of books and DVDs on every conceivable opening, on tactics and puzzles ad infinitum, on mastering the endgame, on game collections and so on. It’s enough to keep the chess junkie browsing until his clock starts for the next round.

However, it is rarer to find books that investigate chess culture itself. True, there are plenty of biographies and portraits of well-known players past and present, such as the Kasparov series of My Great Predecessors books and the earlier Profile of a Prodigy. Yet in The Kings of New York, author Michael Weinreb paints a masterful portrait of the vibrant scholastic chess world as it exists in the twenty-first century."

This review can also be found in the archives at ChessCafe.