theme artistry volume one exercises in tactical thematic combinations

By E.A. Furst

Out of Print Extremely RARE 2000 First AMERICAN PAPERBACK Edition from Caissa's Press, Cleveland, OH USA * Collectable LIKE NEW * practically NEW, but with minute shelf wear. Book has never been read.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1879394014
• ISBN13: 9781879394018
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: CAISSA'S PRESS
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Excellent Once You Figure It Out

As did the previous reviewer, I bought all five books in the series (quite recently). They are available if you shop around for a reasonable price; I paid $[...] per volume. The books are old, with ancient and creaking computer typesetting, making them at least at first very annoying and hard on the eyes. But stick with it, and you'll get a nice payback. In each book the author presents hundreds of examples of well-categorized tactical themes and ideas, with good verbal descriptions of what's going on. These books are more "chatty" than usual for books of tactics problems. The indexes reflect the author's "taxonomy" of themes and motifs, and that too takes some accustomization, but all in all it proves useful in the end. You can, for instance, trace a motif such as "rook lift" through all five books and get examples and practice in a very wide range of situations, at all stages of a game; this is something that is hard to find elsewhere in the literature. The author claims you can work through all five books in 750 hours. I doubt it. There is so much here I believe it will take a lot longer. One tip: the author shows a simple windowed template on the last page that you used to be able to order from him. Make one yourself from poster board; this allows you to cover up the explanations and solution, and just see the problem diagram. It is very much better to try to solve each position on your own before reading the text. My recommendation: if you can also find these at a reasonable price ($[...] or less for the set of five), and you can lay out that much cash (the purpose of a credit card, I suppose), pick up the whole set. There is a lot of value here. It comes at the additional price of real effort... but that's always the case.

An Original Approach

This is one book in a 5 book series. I purchased all 5 books a few years ago when I had more money than I knew what to do with. The books used to cost only 20$ each. These books are all set up in a puzzle book format. The books were written entirely with a computer and it shows. All of the examples are grouped by theme. His method of annotation uses a longer descriptive format that does take some time to get used to. What I mean is each example has a narrative spelled out with words and very little chess notation. (The pawn deflects the kings defender into.....) You read description of the solution and then try to "see" the described solution. If you are not familiar with the terms he uses then the narrative descriptions of the positions will look like they are written in Chinese. With some time you will get the hang of it. The book also comes with an index in the back that sorts the data in all types of ways. The index is just as original as the rest of the book and will take some getting used to. I give these books five stars for originality but award only four stars because these computer formatted books are difficult to adjust to. All in all they are all certainly worth the money.