The Immortal Game: A History of Chess & Its Consequences
Language: English
Published by Doubleday, 2006
- Hardcover
- New

Seller: Revaluation Books, Exeter, United KingdomRevaluation Books
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
Condition: New
£ 46.33
Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
304 pages. 9.50x6.25x1.00 inches. In Stock.
Seller Inventory # 0385510101
- Title
- The Immortal Game: A History of Chess & Its Consequences
- Author
- David Shenk
- Publisher
- Doubleday
- Publication year
- 2006
- Condition
- Brand New
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0385510101
- ISBN 13
- 9780385510103
- Item weight
- 0.61 kilograms
Nearly everyone has played chess at some point in their lives. Its rules and pieces have served as a metaphor for society, influencing military strategy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and literature and the arts. It has been condemned as the devils game by popes, rabbis, and imams, and lauded as a guide to proper living by other popes, rabbis, and imams. Marcel Duchamp was so absorbed in the game that he ignored his wife on their honeymoon. Caliph Muhammad al-Amin lost his throne (and his head) trying to checkmate a courtier. Ben Franklin used the game as a cover for secret diplomacy.
In his wide-ranging and ever-fascinating examination of chess, David Shenk gleefully unearths the hidden history of a game that seems so simple yet contains infinity. From its invention somewhere in India around 500 A.D., to its enthusiastic adoption by the Persians and its spread by Islamic warriors, to its remarkable use as a moral guide in the Middle Ages and its political utility in the Enlightenment, to its crucial importance in the birth of cognitive science and its key role in the aesthetic of modernism in twentieth-century art, to its twenty-first-century importance in the development of artificial intelligence and use as a teaching tool in inner-city America, chess has been a remarkably omnipresent factor in the development of civilization.
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About the Author
DAVID SHENK is a national-bestselling author of four previous books, including The Forgetting and Data Smog, and a contributor to National Geographic, Gourmet, Harper's, The New Yorker, NPR and PBS. The Forgetting was hailed by John Bayley as "the definitive work on Alzheimer's," and subsequently inspired an Emmy-award winning PBS film of the same name. Shenk frequently lectures on issues of health, aging, and technology, and has advised the President's Council on Bioethics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Revaluation Books
Exeter, United Kingdom
AbeBooks seller since January 6, 2003
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Edward Bowditch Ltd
Exstowe, Exton
Exeter, United Kingdom EX3 0PP
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