Accounts of significant chess experiences lightly salted with self-regard and sometimes peppered with platitude.
A former British Chess Champion (2004-2006) considers the connections between chess and life—and finds many.
Rowson (Chess for Zebras, 2005, etc.), who now plays only occasionally, delivers a narrative sometimes thickened with quotations and allusions, both from literary and intellectual figures (Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Emerson, Dylan Thomas) and from popular culture (The Velveteen Rabbit, The Wire, Groundhog Day). His text is a somewhat motley mix of memoir and self-help. We learn about his boyhood beginnings with chess and various games (good, bad, and ugly), his marriage and son, and his decision to return to school to get his doctorate. Rowson divides his chapters (more than 60) into subheadings that bear such titles as “Ceasing Hostilities,” “How to Give Praise,” “The Politics of Puppets and Muppets,” and “Race Is Not Black and White.” His advice ranges from trenchant to amusing—e.g., a wonderful section about applying chess strategy to changing an infant’s diapers. The author also offers bons mots (“chess players are like sniffer dogs”), some of which could appear in just about any self-help text (“We are more like glass tables than we typically imagine. Mostly we are solid, but we can and do crack up”). Along the way, Rowson deals with politics, religion, mistakes, artificial intelligence, and the traits that champions possess, among many other weighty matters. Perhaps the most affecting—and modest—moments are when he writes about accepting your status and about decline and death. “I am probably Scotland’s strongest-ever player, but with all due respect to fellow Scots, in chess terms that is a bit like being the highest mountain in Kansas,” he writes of his career. “I never threatened to be the very best British player, and I was never world class.”
Accounts of significant chess experiences lightly salted with self-regard and sometimes peppered with platitude.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-332-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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