My pick for the very best recent biographical collection will surprise no one familiar with it: Alexei Shirov's Fire on Board. With Shirov now playing for (some sort of) world championship, we are lucky to have this stunning collection of: (a) 82 densely-annotated tournament games; (b) 16 additional slugfests in a separate section devoted to the wild Botvinnik Variation of the Slav Defense; and (c) 13 heavily-annotated endgames which would by themselves make a very nice little book.

Cadogan's decision to used oversize pages in order not to miss out on any of this proved to be wise indeed. All three sections are brilliant. Shirov's book is not as demanding as Speelman's (also reviewed by me), but is still rather dense. Although anyone can have fun with the games themselves, it's quite possible that readers under 1800 may feel disoriented by the lack of elementary instructive support from the author. We should realize that Shirov, like Anand but more so, is a primary representative of the ultra-dynamic modern style. He calls his own style "very concrete," which is consistent with his now-renowned powers of calculation; and makes this fascinating comment: "I have always tried to be not just a tactician--working with a positional player such as Bagirov and studying hard has helped me to develop my own strategic understanding, although chess is nowadays so concrete that pure strategy practically doesn't exist for me." An amazing statement which pretty much sums up what's been happening in chess, beginning with Kasparov. One could easily imagine Anand, Topalov, Kramnik, Ivanchuk, Polgar or any number of other top-class players saying the same thing. Pure strategy may not be dead; but it's been missing in action for 20 years or so, which is not auspicious! The fact is, Shirov's "concrete style" has allowed him to break the old rules seemingly at will, unleashing a torrent of creativity which is evident in practically every one of these games.

When I first read this book last fall, I felt like I was being treated to a long display of stunning fireworks. If you like complex tactics, this book is a gold mine. But more importantly, you will get typical examples of prolonged dynamic play which never seems to clearly resolve in one side's favor despite hammer blow after hammer blow. Sometime it seems as though Shirov is involved in a Lasker-Napier sort of game every few rounds! Furthermore, remarkably, many of his most complex battles resolve into intriguing endgames, the area of the game Shirov believes he's best at. This may well be true, since pure calculation pays off most in endings; at any rate, there are certainly some wonderful ones sprinkled throughout the book as well as in their own section at its end. There is simply too much to praise in this work to fit into a short review. If you don't already have it, get it!

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