| When I started playing tournament chess in the fall of 1972, one could count the number of widely circulated endgame books in English on one hand. There was Fine's monumental Basic Chess Endings, Hooper and Euwe's one volume book on the endings and a curious book called The Tactics of Endgame by Jeno Ban. The latter was translated from Hungarian, and instead of teaching endgame theory in textbook fashion, was filled with all sorts of studies that showed the amazing sorts of tactics possible with very few pieces on the board. Today, more than three decades later, I'm amazed at how many fine books on the endgame have appeared in recent years. Works by Shereshevsky, Nunn, Mueller, Howell, Dvoretsky, Emms, Lutz, Minev, Mikhalchishin and Flear all insure that today's student of the game has no excuses when it comes to learning how to play endgames properly. Still, until just a few months ago, I thought nostalgically about Ban's book and wondered why someone had not thought of the idea of doing another on this theme. John Nunn had written his Endgame Challenge in 2002, with 250 endgame studies to try and solve, but I'm afraid for many mortals, they might have been just a little too tough. This made the appearance of Van Perlos' Endgame Tactics (New in Chess - www.newinchess.com, 2006, 479 pages, paperback, figurine algerbraic, $29.95) a most welcome one. Mr. Van Perlo has produced a collection of over 1,100 positions, primarily from actual games, which illustrate just what pieces can do when they work to their maximum. This book is filled with endgames of all sorts - pawn, queen, rook, minor piece endgames and various combinations thereof. The degree of difficulty of examples varies and this, coupled with the numerous diagrams, make for a wonderful book to dabble in whenever you have a few minutes to spare. There are few chess books that one can recommend to a wide audience but Van Perlos' Endgame Tactics is one of them. |