Should Jeremy Silman Write About Chess Books?

I have mixed feelings about this. Silman is an exceptional teacher, but his psychology and bias sometimes prevent objective reviews. 

In 2013, Jeremy Silman's article "Dinos to the Slav: Silman on Apple Apps" placed 3rd in the annual Best of Chess Life Online writing competition. In the article, Silman reviewed an ostensibly complete lineup of English-language chess publishers and chess-related iOS apps. Judges praised the article for its completeness. GM Ben Finegold wrote, "Jeremy certainly did his homework...."

But perhaps he had not. As I pointed out in the comments section to the article, Silman forgot to mention one of the major chess publishers in the world, Mongoose Press (footnote 1). He also forgot to mention the best (in my opinion) chess e-reader app available today, Forward Chess. Forward Chess not only distributes chess e-books for some of the major chess book publishers in the world (Quality Chess, Informant, Mongoose Press, Russell Enterprises, and Chess Stars), it also has an incredible user interface that includes Stockfish analysis for any move -- any move inside or out of the book. How did this oversight happen? Is it because Silman has money invested in his own chess book e-reader, E+ Chess, and didn't want to mention a competitor?

This week, in Silman's weekly article for chess.com, he has written about physical chess books. Again I question his prose. Silman writes, "Keep in mind that more chess books have been written than books about all other sports and games combined!"

Really? This line has been repeated over and over again by chess journalists, but nobody ever credits a source. Anyone who has followed the chess publishing business during the past decade will know that roughly 200 chess books get published per annum. This is quite a bit less than all other games and sports combined. A little informal research on Amazon will show that a search for "baseball" books gets more hits (42,000) than "chess" books (24,000), as a rough relative estimate for all-time volume. Perhaps this unattributable quote was true back in a day when most sports and games were in their infancy and chess was already an established pastime. Although a somewhat irrelevant inaccuracy, the quote sets up a harmful pair of sentences: "And though I have around 4,000 chess books, a couple of my friends have far more than that! In fact, my collection is considered to be nothing more than a good 'working' library."

4,000 chess books is a lot for one person to own, probably more than almost every other chess player or collector in the country, save a fraction of a percent. Let's break down Silman's writing. He uses the passive voice ("is considered to be") to attribute a quote ("working") to some (yet again) unidentified source. Through the passive voice, Silman tries to provide an authority to the idea that owning 4,000 chess books is not a big deal, without having to admit that it is not a big deal. But he can't find anyone to say it's not a big deal! Thus the lack of a source. Silman loves chess books. A lot of us around here do. He doesn't need to pretend that owning 4,000 is not a big deal. His false modesty poses a dilema for the aspiring student: if 4,000 books is "nothing more than a working library," then this implies that a library with fewer books must be inadequate. What Silman could have said was that a library of 50-75 solid, excpetional books should be all you need. Then he could have written an exceptional article, using his masterly ability to break down and create instructional prose, to explain why.

In the same article Silman asks his friends -- most of them around the same age, most of them people he's known for decades,  most of them who play in the same Northern California chess circle -- to recommend a few good books. Silman worries that, "Some books are in just about everyone’s list, which tells you a lot about those particular tomes." Well, yes and no. 82 books or sets of books were listed in total. Not a bad list. Not a bad variety. As an exercise, I compiled a list of books recommended by Silman's friends. Here's a list of the top eleven, with the number of times they're mentioned, in parenthases.

TAL-BOTVINNIK, 1960 by Mikhail Tal (5)
MY 60 MEMORABLE GAMES by Robert Fischer (5)
ZURICH INTERNATIONAL CHESS TOURNAMENT 1953 by David Bronstein (5)
MY BEST GAMES OF CHESS, VOLUMES ONE AND TWO by Alexander Alekhine (5)
HOW TO REASSESS YOUR CHESS by Jeremy Silman (4)
THE LIFE & GAMES OF MIKHAIL TAL by Tal (3)
SOVIET CHESS 1917-1991 by Andy Soltis (3)
MY SYSTEM by Aron Nimzowitsch (3)
CHESS PRAXIS by Aron Nimzowitsch (3)
CAPABLANCA’S BEST CHESS ENDINGS by Irving Chernev (3)
ENDGAME STRATEGY by Mikhail Shereshevsky (3)

But as the comments to the article show, many great chess books have been omitted or can be debated. Different books resonate with different people, at different times, for different reasons. If there does happen to be a relative lack of variety in the article, then it wouldn't surprise me. If you ask a bunch of 40- to 60-year-old men who live in Northern California to name the best NFL quarterback of all time, how often would you hear "Joe Montana?"

==
 1. At the end of Silman's most recent chess.com article he praises one of the first books to ever be published by Mongoose, Igor Sukhin's CHESS GEMS: 1,000 COMBINATIONS YOU SHOULD KNOW. Silman writes, "The author put a lot of love into this book, and if you want to study tactics, then you can’t do better than this!" If one of Silman's favorite tactics books was written by Mongoose Press, then he surely knew about them before he wrote his Chess Life Online article.

Well now that the hairs have been well and truly split, don't you feel better?  Frankly, I thought it was an interesting article.  If you're expecting every article to be completely comprehensive and unbiased, you're going to have to wait a while because it hasn't happened yet and is likely not to happen for, oh, the foreseeable future.  And when it does happen, the article will be book length and about as interesting as reading a phone book.  Won't that be great?

As an example, The Millions is a book site I frequent.  I love their lists of favourite books and best books.  I'm addicted to the lists even though some of my favourite books always seem to get left out.  That's just the way things go.  Do I disagree with some of the choices? Yes.  Do I question whether the list writer should be allowed to write about books?  Heck no.

Biases are what make articles interesting.  I read the Silman article because I wanted to see what other people's opinions were, not because I was looking for a definitive list of all the books and all the publishers.  Suggesting that someone should never write about chess books because he may have missed your favourites is kind of ridiculous.

If you can do better than just do so.

Let's just assume for argument's sake that my complaint about his most recent article is hairsplitting. Fine. I'll concede that. But my first charge is more serious. Silman completely omitted some world-class chess book publishers and apps from an earlier review, for no apparent reason other than because they were competition to his own app. How are we to view his objectivity after this? In his most recent article I noticed additional, albiet less severe, objectivity issues. I saw a trend and thought I'd write about it.

This blog post is an example of what I don't like about the chess community, IE, the never-ending navel gazing that takes place while looking for fault from others in the community.

I think it comes from our training as chess players, as we are always looking to "refute" every idea.

You certainly have your right to have a dissenting view of Silman's objectivity and you also may be correct. I just don't see why it matters.

The apps you mention are very good ones. 

Do you know why he didn't get to every single app? Do you know that he purposely excluded anything?  Or is this conjecture.  For me, the apparent reason would be that you can only cover so many things in an article.  You can't cover everything.

You know, I'd be more understanding if you were trying to quibble over why book A was included but book B wasn't.  That sort of stuff can be fun to a point.  We all have our favourites and it's the differences between our lists and viewpoints that can make these threads fun.  Dismissing the author outright for some perceived slight isn't fun.  It's ridiculous.

Could it be that OneArrow has a personal bias in this?

He mentions that Silman excludes Mongoose Press.  OneArrow has written some books with Mongoose Press as the publisher.

There are a lot of apps out there.  He is taking shots because in an article that was written in 2013, Silman did not include an app that he currently and personally likes.  Ahem, it is now 2015.  And that app also puts out the Mongoose books, ah yes, the place that publishes OneArrow's books.

I'm sorry but there is a certain lack of objectivity that might be present.

I knew I'd get some heat for this post. No problem. Silman's article is fantastic in many respects. I love to read people's opinions about chess books. Great stuff. The article, in its own right, is fantastic for the content it includes. What I'm trying to get at is this: how can we trust the article for what it does not include? The list of books is great. But when Silman gets a bunch of friends together who mostly think alike, and when he has a history of omitting, because of political reasons, important information from previous reviews, one begins to think. What books did he leave off his list for political reasons? To answer Moriarty's question, no, I can't be 100% positive Silman purposely left out Mongoose Press and the Forward Chess app from his award-winning Chess Life Online article, but I can be pretty sure.

The general philosophical question playing out here is what constitutes a fib. If a kid comes home from a friend's house, where he just finished smoking a joint, and his mom asks, "Where were you," and the kid says, "I was at Steve's house," but doesn't say "I was at Steve's house smoking a joint," is that okay? Well, yes and no, depending on who's asking. When Silman writes a formal article for public consumption, he has a responsibility to say, "I was at Steve's house smoking a joint." Full disclosure required.

I own too many chess books myself, and I'm not proud of it. I can sense in Silman's prose, through his apparent false modesty, that he's uncomfortable with 4,000 books. Sensing that disomfort in his writing, and then seeing him glorify owning 4,000 books, and implying that that is merely a working library, doesn't pass the smell test for me. I feel that something is hiding under the surface not being said. Combine this with a more aggregious omission in a previous article, and I thought it was appropriate to say something.... I'm not splitting imaginary hairs ... they're just very fine and difficult to see.

Yes, I am completely biased when writing these posts. I do have a book out with Mongoose Press. Silman's content is great for what's there, but I wonder what's not there. I see his omissions only because I am affiliated with Mongoose and my radar is tuned to look for these things. For others their radar is not tuned, like the mom who does not know to specifically ask her son, "Where you smoking dope at Steve's house?"

Look, I originally wrote this post as a blog or as a more formal article, and then I thought better to keep it a post, where it would not get much attention. But I need to vent. My radar is tuned.

You have no evidence that Silman purposely left out Mongoose Press books and that app.  Give it a break.  He was posting what he found to be the best apps, a couple of years ago.  I can tell you that I did not find Foward Chess or download the app until a few months ago.  I also have no political reason to not have found it until then.

Yes, he asked his friends that were stronger players for their opinions on books.  It is their opinions.

You also are quick to point out his statement about 4000 chess books.  That really doesn't matter and gives no indication about the accuracy of his statements regarding apps, 1 1/2 - 2 years ago.

And yes, it has been said many times that there have been more chess books published than on any other sport or activity.  No one needs source authority to make such a statement.  Wouldn't you agree that there have been a heck of a lot of chess books written and published since the time of Greco?

Shipov's Hedgehog series and Amateur to IM are good and from Mongoose. 

"The general philosophical question playing out here is what constitutes a fib. If a kid comes home from a friend's house, where he just finished smoking a joint, and his mom asks, "Where were you," and the kid says, "I was at Steve's house," but doesn't say "I was at Steve's house smoking a joint," is that okay?"

He isn't lying because he really was at Steve's. 

Makes sense to me.

Moral of the story: Don't name your kid Steve.

The answer is yes, he should write about chess books.

Here's a link to Silman's site that covers book reviews.

http://www.jeremysilman.com/shop/pc/home.asp

zzzzzzzzzzzzzz....

One of the skills of being a rational human being is reading something and understanding what bias they may have. Silman was not trying to say what the ebst chess books were, he was just trying to lost his favourites. 1000's of people have favourite books but having a list of 1000's of books would not help prospective chess players.

You should have started by saying that you published books with Mongoose (or mentioned it at some point of your post). Given that you failed to disclosure that, I don´t know if you are qualified to criticize other people´s motives (while mentioning that they would have hidden motives).

And your original post was excessively long and not really interesting.

I really hope that your books are much more engaging.

If you do not like Silman dump him but do buy his book Complete end game for $20 and you get a myriad of end games.