Nice review , I am going to look the book up.
GM Ian Rogers' review of Australian Chess Brilliancies
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Here also is well-known chess book author IM John Donaldson's recent (15 June 2009) review of this book:
Kevin Casey’s Australian Chess Brilliancies: Creative Attacking Chess from Down Under (Kimberly Publications, PO Box 6095, Upper Mount Gravatt, Queensland 4122, Australia - kimpub@bigpond.net.au, 96 pages, algebraic notation, paperback, pricing information at the end of this review) is several books in one. Part games collection and part informal attacking manual, it also includes biographical information on leading Australian players including Grandmasters Ian Rogers, Darryl Johansen, Zong Zhao and David Smerdon.
The well travelled Mr. Casey, who grew up in California and spent time living in Hawaii, Alaska and Washington before settling permanently in Australia in 1991, is a big fan of entertaining and instructive attacking chess. The 29 featured games range from Sztern v Purdy 1974 to Mijatovic v West 2009 and are all deeply annotated with a nice mixture of prose and concrete variations. The analysis is often based on that provided by the players for this volume. A few of the games, like Ian Rogers’ celebrated victory over Brazilian Grandmaster Milos at the 1992 Manila Olympiad – an effort that should have won him the first brilliancy prize until Garry Kasparov started lobbying – will be known to many, but the vast majority will not be widely known.
Australian Chess Brilliancies: Creative Attacking Chess from Down Under is nicely produced, with a clean two column layout, good paper and a sturdy flexi cover. The price for a signed copy is $19.95 Australian Dollars, and shipping to everywhere outside of Australia or New Zealand is $7.90 AUD, so the total is $27.85 AUD ( roughly $23 US dollars) for readers in the USA, Britain, Europe etc., with Paypal being the most convenient way to pay.
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"Australian chess books have been as rare as Anand blunders, so to see two appear in the past year seems like an embarrassment of riches. However, while 2008's bestseller Moral Victories was Australian only through its author, David Lovejoy, the latest publication - Australian Chess Brilliancies - is 100% local content, setting out to showcase Australia to the world.
Queensland author Kevin Casey has collected 29 of the most spectacular games ever played by Australians, both at home and abroad, and provided his own comments.
Some of the games are already well known, having won international prizes, but Casey has found some hidden gems - games that would have been acclaimed worldwide had the winner's name been Kasparov or Anand.
Australian Chess Brilliancies also provides game annotations which include relevant and topical information about the players and their achievements.
Casey also provides an amusing introductory essay on defining a chess brilliancy, the primary purpose of which seems to be to give examples of near-misses from the author's own games.
So how good are the games in Australian Chess Brilliancies? Very impressive indeed, is the short answer.
One could quibble about some selection criteria: perhaps there are too many one-move wonders, and why only two games pre-1980? How is it that no game by 'the Australian Tal', Doug Hamilton, made the cut?
However, as an example of high voltage chess, this book is hard to beat and Casey should also be thanked for rescuing some epic Australian games from obscurity.
Reading Australian Chess Brilliancies gave a similar feeling to that I experienced when reading Tibor Karolyi's "Judit Polgar - The Princess of Chess"; I kept thinking 'Amazing stuff! Why isn't that game famous?'
(KC - Ian then goes on to provide his own annotations for one of the games from the book - Goldsmith-Prods, 1981, then concludes...)
Australian Chess Brilliancies is available from Kimberley Publications (kimpub@bigpond.net.au) "
A review by IM John Donaldson will also be appearing soon at jeremysilman.com Keep an eye out on Seagaard's Chess Reviews site and chesscafe.com Reviews there shouldn't be too far away....
Cheers!
Kevin Casey