Customer Reviews

Amos Burn: A Chess Biography

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These days Amos Burn is remembered as a somewhat dour and obscure player who was famous for losing a couple of brevities to more famous players like Frank Marshall. Burn had a defensive/positional approach to chess and was by all reports quite reserved and taciturn. So what incentive would there be to catalogue his chess career in such great detail. The secret with this book is that it brings Burn to life within the context of his times and historical setting (1870s to 1920s). The players, the tournaments, the controversies are analysed in at times great detail, and are overall very interesting and holds the reader's attention throughout. The various elements (games, notes, pictures, tournament tables, and background details) are superbly presented to enable the reader to drop in and out (you will not be able to digest the material in one sitting) without getting lost in the enormous detail. This is a desert island book par excellence and will provide interesting reading for years. The closest comparison is the excellent book on Alekhine by Skinner and Verhoeven (same publishers). If you think that it is the biggest chess book on the planet, the Burn book is in fact bigger. It is not just the size, but that it takes chess biography/game collections to a higher level. I thought that this would be impossible as the Alekhine book is a masterpiece (it's only weakness is the absence of photos - has only one - the Burn book has hundreds). The games are a comprehensive collection, as unlike Alekhine, Burn did not tend to play a lot of simultaneous and blindfold games, with the inevitable variablity in quality. The games therefore are uniformly good, but not quite reaching Alekhine's genius (both highs and lows). The annotations are outstanding, both compemtorary and brought up to date by Forster (who is a strong player himself). Any serious student of chess will be richly rewarded. Although quite expensive, the book contains enormous value and will definately become a classic. It has the expected excellent McFarland touch (quality paper, library quality binding, high quality layout and general presentation, etc) and despite its size (over 950 pages)is unlikely to fall apart. I believe that this book sets a new challenge for chess authors and is quite likely to be the best book of its type ever written. Even Edward Winter, one of the supreme chess authors, has in a recent review admitted that this is the book that he would have liked to have written. I cannot wait for Forster to turn his mind to Lasker or indeed any of the other world champions who richly deserve this treatment. Buy this book, you will not regret it.
Walter Hart, Burra Creek, Australia

Why? Let me count the ways...

The heart of the book is Burn's games. It is hard to see how Forster's treatment of them could be improved. First, he unearthed over 900 of Burn's games; only about 500 of those appear in databases or other books. Second, his annotations are marvelous. All annotations by the players, or by a contemporary chess columnist, are given. These include comments by many of the leading lights of the time (in particular Steinitz). In addition--and what is crucial--Forster, an IM, analyzed the games himself (with the help of a computer) and often adds excellent annotations of his own, or corrects errors in the contemporary annotations.Hundreds of the games are annotated, many of them in great depth. Third, the indexes: There are indexes of all the games based on the openings and opponents' names, as is customary, but in addition games are arranged in a seperate index according to the chess themes they exemplify. It includes entries such as "stubborn defense"; "instructive games"; "rook endings"; "positional sacrifices"; "Bishops of opposite color"; etc., etc. For those looking to improve by seeing how Burn handles certain types of positions--the #1 reason people buy collections of master games in the first place--this is invaluable.

Apart form the games, this book's biographical section is excellent. Just about every fact known about Burn--birth, death, family, work, travel, chess tournaments participation, club memberships, relations with other players, etc.--is given. Here, too, Forster "goes the extra mile": for example, for every tournament Burn participated in, he gives us not only his results and opponents, but the complete crosstable (when available); he not only tells us when Burn played in the Liverpool chess club, but what exact positions he held, the text of some of his speeches (or speeches in his honor) given at the club, and so on.

Finally, there is production value. The book is HUGE--over 900 folio pages on high-grade paper--in excellent, hard-cover blue velvet covering, with a gold-embossed title, and includes numerous rare photographs. "They don't make 'em like that anymore", as a cursory glance at the endless stream of thin soft-cover books on your local bookstore's "chess" section will show.

At $75, it's a bargain.

Truly a magnificent undertaking by Richard Forster who not only provides a detailed study of Amos Burn's chess career but also a truly enlightening history of chess as it was played at that time and the chess players who played it. If you want to learn more about chess and the chess players of the second half of the 19th century, here is the book for you. This book also provides a standard by which all other chess biographies and games collections should model themselves after. I would give this book 50 stars if I could.

This book is easy to recommend for those interested in Burn's career, or even people interested late 19th century/ early 20th century chess, especially the players based in England at that time. It's well worth the high price tag if you fit in that group.

I put myself in that group -- I'm not a particular fan of Burn (I don't mean that as a slight -- I'd just not read much about him, or played over many of his games until I read this book), but I love the dark recesses of chess history, and the period covered in this book especially fascinates me.

Forster does a decent job of setting the background in which Burn lived by documenting some of the club politics and events of the times. This can sometimes be rather dry reading, but that's one problem chess biographers face -- oftentimes the great players lived rather mundane lives outside of chess.

That said, I admire the scholarship of the book. There is a lengthy appendix, bibliography, and index, as well as an index of openings, and credits for annotations which Forster did not write himself. This book will function as a reliable reference for those interested in Burn or the players of his time.

There are a *lot* of games, all, or virtually all, annotated by Burn, other players of the age (especially appreciated are the notes by Steinitz, since his writings aren't easy to come by these days), or Forster, who is an International Master himself.

There is a massive amount of material here --972 pages, including index, etc, and plenty of tournament tables, pictures, and other diagrams. The most surprising revelation to me is that Burn was a very fine tactical player. There are quite a number of brilliant attacking games in his praxis.

So, how to recommend? If you have no real interest in Burn or his games, it probably won't be worth the money to you. However, if you do have an interest, you can hardly go wrong. The book is beautifully bound, as is common with the McFarland chess books. It is rare to find such quality in any field. Forster's work is easily one of the greatest chess biographies ever written.

This is the best chess book I have ever seen. It's what I think the perfect chess book biography should be. It has annotated games, chronology of the player, crosstables, history, best indexes I have ever seen, pictures and photographs, trivia, and absolutely thorough (972 pages!). Richard Forster wrote the best chess book possible on a less-famous chess master. I wish every great chess master from the past had a book like this. The publisher, McFarland and Company, put together this book, which I think is there finest work. - Bill Wall

This extraordinary biography by Richard Forster, a Swiss International Master, is unquestionably one of the greatest chess books ever. It is head and shoulders above well over 99% of chess books. As other reviewers have remarked, it is 972 huge pages long and of exceptional, almost unprecedented, quality. Forster spent "three years of intensive labour and research" (and I believe it!) writing this incredible book, which collects every known game of Burn's, all of Burn's tournament results (including crosstables from every tournament), and dozens of photos. Forster has gone to primary source materials and furnishes thousands of annotations made at the time of these games, as well as adding his own (occasionally computer-assisted) analysis. (Use Google to find the hitherto virtually unknown game between Macdonald and Burn, offhand game, Liverpool 1910, featuring the most amazing move of all time, 33...Qg4!!!, unearthed by Forster from the Morning Post and the Chess Amateur. Yes, more amazing than Marshall's ...Qg3!!! against Levitsky.) Even the multiple indices are remarkable, including an Index of Openings, Index of Annotators, Index of Themes ("great 'swindles'," "instructive attacks," trapped pieces, king hunts, sacrifices on various squares, etc., etc.), Index of Players, Index of Supplementary games, and General Index. It is hard to imagine anything about Amos Burn that this book should have but doesn't. It is absolutely the gold standard of chess biographies. A phenomenal book.

I can't say enough about this wonderful book. Few players know how strong Burn was; Per chess metrics he was #6 in the world, at one point. The annotations are great.

They are from source material at the time. They are done by world class players, and where appropriate they are corrected by the author an IM himself. Also, they are not just informat like a long line followed by a symbol with no explanation. They are done with words; they are understandable by the sub
2000 player. Burn did not play many odds or simul games; so, the games for the most part are against equals.

Also, since Burn waa not an Alekhine or Botvinnik; we see many games which are imperfect, but where he wins or loses just like a human player, not a god. We learn more from those games than we do from a 100 Kasparov games.

Also, the book is an excellemt biography; it gives a great view of the English and European chess scence. Also, this gives us a great view of ches from Morphy to Stenitz. Not only because Burn played those players but he was pupil of Stenitz. Judging from his games he wanted to play like Morphy, but struggled to play in mordern style.

I only wish there we books like this for Kashdan, Nimzovitch, Geller. I Realize the same publisher has done a book on Kashdan and is ready to issue one one on Nimzovitch, but it does not fell as if it will be at the same level'

This is to game collections what "New York 1924" or "Zurich 1953" is too tournament books.