My first, second, and continued reaction to GM Paul Motwani's S.T.A.R. Chess is: I don't get it. I know that this book's predecessors, H.O.T. Chess and C.O.O.L. Chess, are quite popular (unfortunately, I haven't read them), so there will undoubtedly be enthusiastic fans of Motwani's latest effort as well. But to me, it is a book that combines apparently unrelated chess games with rambling and ridiculously self-indulgent prose. Moreover, from the examples I've looked at closely, the chess analysis itself is unimpressive (especially for a grandmaster); Motwani consistently prefers to show cheap tricks instead of examining the best moves, and apparently takes little or no time to research the numerous comments he makes about known positions. Worse still, it's never clear (to me, anyway) what the reader is supposed to be learning. The author seems far too in love with himself to slow down and tell us, and the constant supply of irrelevant "puzzles" and amazingly banal new-age blather doesn't help in this regard. It seems to me that at some point, the stream of acronyms, colorless stories, bad poetry, astrological presentations, and conversations with extra-terrestrials(!) begin to consume so many pages (which the reader is paying for, after all) that the chess content of Motwani's book is seriously impaired. After going through the book a second time, trying to grasp what I was missing, I finally had to ask myself: Did I learn anything from this book? Of course I did--a position here and a position there--but that's not much, and it's a bad sign that I even had to ask.

Well, I've been rather harsh, I admit; so let me present an alternative interpretation. Suppose that you're a chess student, intent upon improvement, say, 1100-1800 in strength. You have a full-time job with precious few hours in the evening for study. You've tried slogging though some encyclopedic endgame or middlegame works, or perhaps one of Watson's humorless, prose-starved opening tomes; but your eyelids just keep getting heavy in the face of such material and, hey, maybe there's something fun to watch on TV? Then one day at a tournament, you pick up a bright, witty book called S.T.A.R. Chess by an infectiously enthusiastic grandmaster who just has the craziest ideas about aliens and astrology, and it really makes you laugh. Better yet, when you play through the annotated games, there's one pretty two-move mate or deflection theme after another, and the pieces are really flying. Gee, this stuff is fun! A S.T.A.R. fan is born.

I can't really see it (especially the "witty" part); but I would much rather have a student of mine be exposed to games and positions for whatever reason than to avoid studying altogether. And, although the games Motwani chooses tend to be a bit obvious, they are chock full of useful tactical themes. So if you can stand Motwani's philosophy and humor (I am resisting putting those words in quotes), this may be a good book for you. I just can't recommend it myself.

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