MY COMMENTS ON KEENE'S REVIEW

Ray Keene utterly eviscerates Taylor Kingston's
review of Aron Nimzowitsch: A Reappraisal.

My heavens, yes.

Keene notes that several criticisms by NM Taylor
Kingston, the man who lies about having "standards,"
are strawmen of his own devising. NM Kingston
criticizes Keene for failing to note earlier games
when such was not the author's purpose and when such
was clearly unnecessary. Then, embarrassingly,
Kingston himself does not know the stem games. For
example, Nimzo-Jokstad and Staunton-Bristol. Kingston
over looks Paulsen-Tarrasch, though it stares up at
him right on the page.

GM Keene points up the truly horrible and arid
pomposity of NM Kingston's prose by skewering the many
easy, false claims made by rgcp's most ungraciously
or, perhaps, disgraciously self-promoted pawn.

One of Keene's interesting points -- also made
by Alekhine in a somewhat different form in a letter
before NY 1927 -- is what would have happened if
Nimzowitsch had won or finished second in that
tournament. It is by no means certain that the Capa
match would have occurred. NY 1927 was a rare duck:
it walked and quacked like a candidates' tournament,
but it was not. Indeed, its walking and quacking were
so duck-like that even Alekhine was worried about his
status were he to perform poorly.

Any criticisms of Ray Keene's exposition? I
have one.He is a professional writer, and one of the
hallmarks of such a writer is not only writing prose
easy on the eye but also knowing what to leave out.
Edward Winter and some of the other ratpackers are
notable for treating all details equally. Not Keene.
Still even he nods now and then.

Look, Ray: when NM Kingston attacked you for
writing a book in a couple of days, I believe that
nearly every reader on this forum understood you
were meeting a deadline following a high-profile chess
match. Which indeed you were.

Ray: I don't believe you need to defend your many
books on top-level matches against the Winterian
ratpackers. Nearly every fairminded reader of this
forum understands that it is not an "admission" to
write a book in two days when you are under
market deadline. It is an ACHIEVEMENT, especially
when the volume shows spark and intelligence. (Of
course, you benefited from the post-mortems with Short
and Kasparov.)

The Winterians do not understand the world of
professional writing. They are windy amateurs whose
labors of love -- for we can give them that much
credit -- would benefit from selectivity (knowing what
to leave out) and a great deal more reading on their part.

Your citations leave NM Kingston gasping and, to
be sure, grasping for the next subject on which to
level another smear. Your comments on the stem games were
devastating, though we must not forget that searching for them
was never your purpose in the selections noted by Kingston.

Such, I know, was not your object. Yet the
unpleasant truth is that you have embarrassed NM
Kingston. You have incommoded his intellectual amour
propre. Based on his past behavior, you may encounter
two or three new anonymice attacking you and defending
him. These anonymice may be Niemand (who is NM
Kingston himself) or earlier incarnations such as Paulie Graf
and Xylothist, when he praised his own work!

-- Larry Parr