Emanuel Lasker, Volume 1

By special arrangement with German publisher Exzelsior Verlag, McFarland is reselling the first volume in a new, English–language series about German chess player and world champion Emanuel Lasker.  This is a multicontributor biographical work, with chapters by a number of acclaimed chess historians.

The first volume covers Lasker’s family history, his childhood, his schooling, and his mathematical work.  Other chapters highlight Lasker’s time and work in England and in the United States, and his contributions to chess problems and chess study. Chess-specific coverage, including many detailed annotated games, was provided by GM Mihail Marin and GM Raj Tischbierek.  Notably, Tischbierek examines Lasker’s competition against Siegbert Tarrasch for the 1908 World Champion’s crown.

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The co-editors are Richard Forster, Michael Negele, and Raj Tischbierek. Richard Forster holds a doctorate in computational linguistics and the international master title in chess. He works as a specialist in artificial intelligence. He was chess columnist of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung for more than 20 years and has participated in six chess Olympiads.  He is the author of Amos Burn: A Chess Biography and The Zurich Chess Club, 1809–2009.  Michael Negele was heavily involved in the monumental German monograph Emanuel Lasker: Denker, Weltenbürger, Schachweltmeister (Exzelsior Verlag, 2009), the thousand-page predecessor to the current three-volume English work.  Raj Tischbierek is the editor-in-chief of monthly chess magazine Schach, and founder of Exzelsior Verlag.

Edited by Richard Forster, Michael Negele, and Raj Tischbierek

Format: library binding (7″ x 10″)
Pages: 464
Bibliographic Info: 190 photos
Copyright Date: 2018
pISBN: 9783935800099
eISBN: n/a
Publisher: Exzelsior Verlag GmbH

1 A Biographical Compass, Part 1
(Michael Negele)

2 Ancestors, Family and Childhood
(Wolfgang Kamm & Tomasz Lissowski)

3 Lasker in Great Britain
(Tony Gillam)

4 Lasker: The American Views
(John Hilbert)

5 Lasker and Mathematics
(Joachim Rosenthal)

6 Lasker’s Endgame Studies
(Jürgen Fleck)

7 Lasker’s Chess Problems
(Ralf Binnewirtz)

8 The Battle Lasker vs Tarrasch
(Raj Tischbierek)

9 Dominator of the Chess World
(Mihail Marin)

• Finalist, Book of the Year–English Chess Federation
• “The editors combined with ten (!) high calibre contributors to produce an outstanding work on Lasker’s early years up to about 1909. All aspects of Lasker’s complex character are explored. Not all the many chapters can be mentioned here; two outstanding are the examination of the World Championship match with Tarrasch in 1908 and Marin’s deep analysis of Lasker’s style. Expensive, but worth every penny.”–English Chess Federation
• “For a player with such a prodigious career as Lasker’s, the widely spread syntagm that he was mainly paying attention to the psychological aspects of the over the board fight is not only unfair, but also presents the risk of lowering his purely technical merits in the public opinion’s eyes. There are a few more objective and deeper elements that make his best games instructive for the modern player. Lasker was an universal player, able to find his way in a wide range of positions, from the most quiet (or boring) ones to the most chaotic and irrational ones. As a general thread, he possessed the ability of generating ideas out of the blue, as a player who would not just follow the requirements of the position, but make the game flow along his own plans. From this point of view I would compare him with David Bronstein and Magnus Carlsen. In an era dominated by computers, the modern player can learn from Lasker’s games how to think independently, a most dangerous weapon against the opponents dependent on the dry “+1.00” way of reasoning. On more concrete terms and even though by far not all his games are linear and flawless, players of all ages and levels will find a handful of positions and sequences perfectly suited for training or learning and, quite surely a lot of fun.”–Mihail Marin
• “This volume, the first of three, presents Lasker in a depth and breadth never before seen. His life, in all its astonishing facets, is reflected in the many contributions by eminent figures in their fields. I can’t speak for my own contribution, but I can for the rest of the book: beautifully bound, handsomely illustrated, finely written, impeccably edited, Emanuel Lasker is that rarest of chess biographies: a worthy historical tribute and a fascinating read.” — John Hilbert