Endgame Virtuoso is a very original book from Smyslov, one of the great modern players. He is renowned for his endgame play, although I should add that he is underrated for his middlegame attacking skills. This book contains 122 endgames from his own games (how many people could find that many decent examples?), and 40 from other players' games. I don't know how useful this book will be to the average player, since so many of the endings are won by superior calculation, and there is little thematic unity among them. For the advanced student, these are instructive and realistic endgames; otherwise, its main value comes from the way in which this book gives us insight into the mind of one of the greats.

I can't say much about the 1999 version of John Nunn's Secrets of Rook Endings, because it is so specialized: there are 342 pages of rook-and-pawn versus rook. Nunn generated every possible ending of this type using a computer program, thus ensuring an error-free book(!). His task was to find themes of interest in this mass of material, and an incredible finding he cites is that there are 209 examples of mutual zugzwang in these endings, all of which he lists. This is a massive, futuristic project, but I'm not sure how many people will find it compelling, the exception being endgame fanatics who want to achieve certainty about these deceptively complex endings.

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