I've always been a sucker for game collections but this one surprised me when it arrived. Kramnik, Kasparov, Karpov, Anand are all household names (go ahead and ask your five-year old son or daughter and he/she will concur), but Sokolov?

Actually, I've followed this fine player's career for quite some time and my surprise was pleasant: a very modern grandmaster versus other modern grandmasters using modern openings. What could be better? This is the leadoff to my shtick.

An index of opponents and an index of openings makes the reader's life a bit easier, but the lack of an introduction is rather shocking: no history, no sense of who this man is, nothing about his fight to get to the top. Is it only me, or do other chess fans care about this kind of information?

What we do get is a book that is easy on the eye. Diagrams are plentiful, each game (there are fifty in all) starts on its own page and every one begins with a welcome paragraph or two by John Nunn.

This "Nunn material" tells us a bit about the tournament and gives us an overview of the actual game (it reminds me of Larry Evans' work in Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games).

The notes to the games (by Sokolov) vary from light to detailed, though they never reach the maniacal heights achieved by Timman and Hubner. Nevertheless, I enjoyed them due to Sokolov's heavy emphasis on the openings, which makes the book rather timely and useful.

The author's mix of prose and variations make this an easy book to read, and the games give us a nice mix of tactical battles and technical strokes. Unfortunately, as is so common in chess books, we feel a distinct lack of the human element. We get more of, "He went to a chess tournament, he played chess, and he didn't do anything in between."

This doesn't stop me from recommending the book, but it could have been so much better...