I once broke up with a good friend over chess. It wasn't that he beat me regularly, which he certainly did. He enjoyed winning too much.

Chess can be a game of aggression as well as skill. Children are taught to shake hands before and after they play a game. Adults could learn from that.

But still, I've loved the game since I was a kid. I never got very good at it, not even when I spent months working out the positions in Modern Chess Openings, 7th Edition.

Chess memories came flooding back as I read David Shenk's new book The Immortal Game: A History of Chess.

This is an excellent book by the way, and can be enjoyed by those who don't play the game. Shenk connects chess to our culture. He explores its historical roots and he tells good stories along the way.

Shenk has excellent writing credentials, wide-ranging interests, and this kind of book suits him well. His earlier book, The Forgetting, was called "the definitive work on Alzheimer's." In The Immortal Game he moves from history to culture to how our minds work.

Another great pleasure in this book is following the progress of a casual but famous game that came to be called "The Immortal Game." Shenk has borrowed that term for the title of his book.

The Immortal Game was played for casual practice before a world tournament in London on June 21, 1851, between two mathematics professors: Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky.

When published, this game astounded the chess world with its cunning combinations, unorthodox play, huge risk taking, and Romantic dash. It since has been analyzed by generations of players who have found better, safer moves. But it remains one of the most entertaining games of chess ever recorded.

The Immortal Game is presented in leisurely segments scattered through the text. Shenk uses the story of the game to talk about himself more personally than he allows in the other chapters, and to show the human side of chess.

At Move 2 he writes, "In retrospect, brilliant achievements often seem preordained. But they are, of course, impossible to schedule or predict... So it is with chess...every once in a while, often when it is least expected, a pair of players stumble into a game of true grace and beauty, danger and cunning, temptation, treachery, and surprise after surprise after surprise. This is precisely what happened to (Anderssen and Kiseritzky)... they sat down for a casual game and fell into a once-in-a-lifetime event... through this game one can imbibe the very spirit of the game."

That's a lot to hang on one game, but Shenk brings it alive, step by step. I found myself reading faster in order to get to the next couple of chess moves. It made the experience of reading the book much richer.

Shenk says "Chess serves as a useful microcosm of human progress" and he makes that case with enthusiasm. "Civilization is built on learned lessons from past achievements and mistakes... Chess works the same way."

The author presents overwhelming clinical evidence that so-called "talent" is mostly the result of hard work and study. "The phenomenon is much less miraculous and much more interesting than commonly portrayed," he says.

"Bobby Fischer, perhaps the most famous chess prodigy of all time, was far from a chess genius out of the box. After toying with the game for a year, he attended a simultaneous display in 1951, at age seven, and lost very quickly to an expert player. Afterward, Fischer joined a club and studied with ferocity. Six years and thousands of chess hours later, he had a spectacular 'breakthrough' at age 13 and was pronounced a boy wonder."

"Whether one is seeking the smartest chess move or trying to unlock an age-old scientific riddle, very often the most intelligent move a person can make is to acknowledge ignorance and seek assistance."

"Seeing all this, I finally got it," the author writes. "We face in our modern, splintered world... a crisis of understanding -- of thought and of willingness to engage in thought.

"One common response to our splintered, postmodern, slippery-truth age is not to think but to instead fall back on a fixed set of beliefs, a strict ideology.

"The single greatest danger to ourselves and future generations is to stop thinking, and it behooves us to do anything we can to encourage spinning, skeptical minds. To do this, we will need powerful thought tools like chess that help our minds expand, grow comfortable with abstraction, and learn to navigate complex systems."

Wake up. It's your move.

Aired Sunday October 1, 2006 at 10:55 am and Wednesday October 4, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Orders/Information:

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess by David Shenk. Doubleday hardcover $26. ISBN 0385510101.