BOOK REVIEW: The Golden Treasury of Chess

A pretty uneven anthology. Unfortunately contains far too many games whose interest lies solely in the last half-dozen moves or so (this is especially true toward the beginning).

Of course, part of the problem I suppose is in the title: is this to be a treasury of positional masterpieces or combinations? Too often Horowitz gives the nod to the latter, and so we are faced with a book reminiscent of The Art of the Checkmate, only with us having to wade through some rather tedious continuations to get to the whole point of the game's inclusion.

Also, the author tends to be a bit punctuation-happy (like Chernev), and that grows awfully cloying and annoying (especially in the openings).

Still, the book does contain a lot of interesting--albeit ancient--games (though with a number of unfortunate omissions as well), so it's fairly entertaining on the whole. And a less experienced player will quite possibly be left gasping at the coruscating brilliancies a lot more than a jaded old hand like myself (although I'm not sure what a tyro will make out of 300+ games with no annotations whatsoever--time to keep Fritz fired up in the corner, I guess!).

Oh yeah, and one more thing: I noticed that I A himself is quite well represented here (with nary a loss to be found). ;)