This book was originally published in Russian around 1960. Jimmy Adams translated it into English around 1990. Alexander Kotov called this book "one of the best books in the world's chess literature". Given Kotov's status as author of "Think Like A Grandmaster" an extremely influential chess book for me and for many grandmasters judging from the amount of coverage he gets in books by other grandmasters I tend to pay attention to his advice on chess literature.

That said, this is a very good book on the middlegame.

The author talks about planning and various positional and tactical themes. The games are quite instructive and for the most part interesting (aside from the few which have the theme of maneuvering and which the author seems to be somewhat disapproving of).

Some of the themes that he considers are hanging pawns (both their strengths and weaknesses), play on the a-file, active play with pawns, play with the heavy pieces (queens and rooks) and some opinions on the significance of the two bishops.

There is a great deal of information to absorb in this book. The introduction where the author introduces many of the key themes runs to 55 pages. The exposition of "The Eternal Knight" was very striking to me and actually caused some criticism of my play in blitz when I chose not to give up my "Eternal Knight" to gain an exchange. I judged the knight more valuable than the rook in that position and I can blame it on Romanovsky .

This is probably a book that I will read again as it is full of very quotable and interesting material. This book is aimed at advanced players. It took me several days to get through it even with a database containing most of the games and positions as it is not a light read. I don't want to discourage anyone from purchasing this volume as it is really a classic book which belongs on everyone's bookshelf.

That puts me half way along my journey in terms of milestones. Ten books down and ten to go by October 8th. I am right on schedule.

Crash

Hey, Crash. Thanks for bringing this book to my attention. I looked at a review on Amazon, and is it true the main instruction the Author provides is via annotated games? That would be a-ok with me but I was just wondering if this was "that kind of book". Thanks.

It is full of annotated games and positions. There is a fairly high proportion of text to moves and there are many positions given without any opening moves. The author always identifies the players so most of these games seem to be readily available in various databases if you want to see the whole game. There is some coverage of the openings as well but it is mostly in the sense of discussing possible plans for either player. Often the author abandons the game as soon as it strays from the theme that he is trying to discuss.

Crash