“White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chess Board”
By Daniel Johnson.
Houghton Miffilin, 384 pages, $26
Reviewed by Harvey Blume

The book’s thesis about the Cold War is that chess was nothing less than sublimated war between the US and the USSR.
For something that is neither war, per se, [...]

By Harvey Blume
Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess Mister. [...]

by Harvey Blume
Marcel Duchamp famously tweaked art for being inferior to chess, saying: “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” Duchamp backed this opinion up by abandoning art for years [...]

By Harvey Blume
Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett
(Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages)
It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for [...]