Sam Sloan

In this book Albert Speer writes about the history of German armaments during World War II. Within these pages he includes information he found in his research that comes from SS records. These included the documents of its chief, Heinrich Himmler, who with Hitler’s consent was determined to infiltrate the war economy with his own people and build an SS industrial complex. Himmler had plan to make the SS completely independent. You will read how truly ruthless the SS were in their quest to follow Himmler’s orders and meet his production goals.… (altro)

Chinese Chess or Xiangqi is an interesting, fast-paced variant of Chess: similar enough to be fairly easy to learn, yet different enough to be interesting even to those thoroughly bored by Western Chess. It's clearly a game worth exploring, but books on the game are rather rare and hard to come by. Sloan's book is from 1980s and slightly dated, but the game hasn't changed, of course, so the lessons contained are still valid.

To be honest, the book could certainly be better. It does cover everything necessary: it introduces the pieces, explains the rules, explains strategy, has sample games... All good and well, yet the presentation could be clearer, the text a tad more captivating and I would really prefer if the sample games were included in their entirety. Still, it works, and to those who prefer reading books to reading web pages, this is still worth considering. The prices currently asked for the book in UK Amazon are way too much, however. It's not that good...

(Original review at my review blog)… (altro)