Review of Teach Yourself Visually Chess

My review of Jon Edwards' fine book, Teach Yourself Visually Chess, is currently available online, at ChessCafe. Here is a brief snippet of my review:

"The author, Jon Edwards, a former U.S. correspondence chess champion with over thirty years’ experience teaching chess, explains his aims:

Some players come to understand the game better than others. The reason, I believe, has much to [do] with the different styles of learning. A few of my students are comfortable memorizing long sequences but, by and large, most prefer to learn the game visually, through pattern recognition and by learning to identify the various visual clues on the board.

As Edwards notes, nearly all other chess books use diagrams and symbols to represent the pieces. In contrast, this book utilizes professional-quality photographs of actual boards and pieces as they would appear to a player during a game. Not a single chess diagram is present."