Short Fuse
By Harvey Blume “The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America,” Riverhead Books. $25.95. Steven Johnson’s new book is as dull and dispiriting as much of his previous work has been eye-opening and exhilarating. In the past, even if Johnson’s conclusions were questionable — as with the high…
Read More“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,…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume “Dreaming up America” By Russell Banks Seven Stories Press, 176 pages, $21.95 This book of essays by novelist and short story writer Russell Banks was published before our country’s financial crisis reached the acute stage from which it may or may not be recovering, or the author would surely have voiced bracing…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Though it does not originate in the Kuiper Belt, the Beijing summer Olympics (8/8/08-8/24/08) is bearing down upon us like an outsized asteroid, bringing China out of feudal/communist distance into full twenty-first century relief. Sports, at this point, remain secondary:before we get to ping-pong, swimming, the shot-put and gymnastics, Americans have unprecedented…
Read Moreby 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 to pursue…
Read MoreBy 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 example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx and Harvey Blume I was asked by National Public Radio’s Morning Edition to write an appreciation of the late Norman Mailer. I have posted an unabridged version of this necessarily short piece. After that, I have placed an interview Harvey Blume had with Mailer after the publication of his 1995 book Oswald’s…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume If you want to get a glimpse of a Joseph Stalin you likely had never conceived of before, just turn to the mug shot taken of him by Tsarist police in 1912 or some of the other photos in Sebag Montefiore fascinating, radically revisionist new biography Young Stalin. This Stalin is no…
Read MoreThere’s a chess opening called the Grob, fully as distasteful as the name might suggest. When white plays the Grob he’s showing disrespect, not only to his opponent but to the game. The Grob does nothing to advance white’s position on the board. That, in fact, is its strength, the one and only thing the…
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