Author: Chris Kantack
Date: 20:56:57 07/24/02
I've just completed reading Tom Standage's new book "The Turk". I had little interest in "The Turk" prior to reading this book. But I found it at my local library (which rarely gets chess books) so I took it home and was pleasently surprised. "The Turk" is very well written and is quite an interesting story. The Turk was built in the late 1700's and was passed off as an automaton that could play chess. Nowadays we know that the Turk was actually guided by a human (usually a very good chess player) hidden inside the machine. What is fascinating about the Turk is how it essentially fooled the world for 85 years! Even after you learn how it worked (near the end of the book) ---the means by which it was done is quite a fascinating read in itself. The Turk's 254+ pages are broken down into 12 chapters. The book begins it story with a brief history of automata (early 1700's. It then goes on to cover the life and times of the people who created and exhibited this 18th Century chess playing machine. The Turk had quite a chess playing career playing the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Philidor, Napolean Bonaparte, and Charles Babbage. Many other people were inspired by performances of the Turk including Edgar Allen Poe. If you have even the slightest interest in the Turk, I highly recommend this book. It's a brand new book (copyright 2002). My local library is filing it under the section on books about chess (794.1). I don't know the Dewey Decimal system's number for magician books but this book would have equal appeal as a magician's book. (So potentially it could be filed with books about stage magic in other libraries.) NPR radio did a story on "The Turk" a few months ago. Check out this link for the audio report: http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/segment_display.cfm?segID=143293 Chris Kantack http://home.earthlink.net/~kantack/lcdchess/home.htm
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