PAL BENKO: MY LIFE, GAMES, and COMPOSITIONS
Authors: Pal Benko and Jeremy Silman
668 pages
Price: $45.00
Siles Press (2004)

Reviewed by John Watson

To come straight to the point, PAL BENKO: MY LIFE, GAMES, and COMPOSITIONS transcends all autobiographical and biographical chess books that I’ve ever seen. Although I’m saving an actual review of it for a later column, I have included the title for the reader’s information. This is an amazing new work by Pal Benko and Jeremy Silman. It combines every feature that a chess biography/games collection could reasonably expect to have. I had a contribution in writing a survey of some opening theory for the book and I was able to watch it develop over several years. Silman’s effort and pure dedication to this work was like none that I have ever seen.

Long-time reviewer Randy Bauer calls it “a monumental effort, a supreme achievement, a breathtaking endeavor, and the standard against which all future chess biographies will be measured.”  Apparently he wasn’t alone in this view, since PAL BENKO: MY LIFE, GAMES, and COMPOSITIONS is the only book to ever win all three major chess book awards in the same year: It walked away with the ChessCafe 2004 Book of the Year Award, the Cramer Book of the Year Award, and the most prestigious award of all – the BCF Book of the Year Award (beating out Kasparov’s My Great Predecessors).

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