Tal, Petrosian, Spassky and Korchnoi A chess multibiography with 207 games

Grandmaster Soltis is one of the best chess players and chess game writers. This great book focuses on four top players from the era when Soviet players dominated: Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and Viktor Korchnoi. The first three held the title of World Champion. Soltis superbly compares them by tracing their exploits and including 207 wonderfully annotated games, thus illustrating the brilliance of each of these four titans. Most fascinating are the accounts of interactions among the four. The full humanity of each player is revealed, along with their particular rivalries and personalities. Soltis further casts the four players in personality types, using the model of the traditional balance of the four humors, as in classical antiquity: Spassky--melancholic; Korchnoi--choleric; Petrosian--lethargic; Tal--sanguine. As Soltis shows, each possessed his own genius. It was said that Tal could remember "about 5,000 games." When he fell ill at a tournament, Tal played from a hotel bathtub: "He lay in a warm bath [and] dictated his moves without looking at the board--and he won this game!" Spassky played Bobby Fischer for the 1972 world championship, "arguably the most widely watched chess event ever." But Spassky lost, marking "the end of a golden age." A splendid, interesting, even fascinating book! Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers. --Donald K. McKim, formerly, Memphis Theological Seminary