Samuel Lipschutz: A Life in Chess - Tapa dura

"This book is one of the titles which deal with the life and chess of masters who are no longer particularly well-known. Biographies such as these reveal a lot about past masters and about the times these masters lived in... Stephen Davies wrote a wonderful and incredibly informative book about an interesting chessplayer and his time.." -- Andre Schulz, ChessBase.com "I heartily recommend this book for the historical perspective it provides, the humour and truths about chessplayers that remain unchanged over the long sweep of history, and I congratulate one of our own for such a remarkably detailed work and for producing a book that makes a valuable contribution to the worldwide body of historical chess knowledge." - 50 Moves Magazine, October 2015 "...one of the finest chess biographies around.This beautifully produced hardback is published by McFarland & Company, Inc., a household name to lovers of chess history (they have more than sixty of such works in their catalogue)." - Kingpin Chess Magazine, August 2016

Samuel Lipschutz was born in Hungary in 1863 and migrated to New York in 1880. He joined the Manhattan and new York Chess Clubs, soon became champion of the latter club and represented it at the British Chess Association Congress in London in 1886. Naturalized in 1888, he was the highest-placed American in the Sixth American Chess congress the following year. In 1892 he defeated Jackson Showalter in a match to become American champion. A sufferer of tuberculosis, he soon spent time away from New York and, after returning in 1895, lost a championship match to Showalter. He went to Germany in 1904 in search of a cure for his illness and died there late the following year. The book gives an account of Lipschutz's chess career, life and milieu and addresses questions surrounding his first name, his periods away from New York and misconceptions concerning the American championship. the book contains 249 of his games.