The Amateur's Mind: Turning Chess Misconceptions into Chess Mastery

• ISBN13: 9781890085025
• Condition: New
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning authorâ€" "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)â€"offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.

A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of! us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even asâ€"simply becauseâ€"it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme playedâ€"on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new keyâ€"by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.

At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.

Th! is book takes the student on a journey through his own mind an! d return s him to the chess board with a wealth of new-found knowledge and the promise of a significant gain in strength. Most amateurs possess erroneous thinking processes that remain with them throughout their chess lives. These flaws in their mental armour result in stinging defeats and painful reversals. Books can be bought and studied, lessons can be taken -- but in the end, these elusive problems always prove to be extremely difficult to eradicate. Seeking a solution to this dilemma, the author wrote down the thoughts of his students while they played actual games, analysed them, and catalogued the most common misconceptions that arose. This second edition greatly expands on the information contained in the popular first edition.