SEVEN GAMES: A Human History
Author: Oliver Roeder
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
Price: $26.95
Pages: 320
As an adolescent, I fancied myself a devotee of the ancient Chinese board game Go. I had never actually played it, but in one of my favourite novels Shibumi, by Trevanian — the super-assassin hero praised Go as a fitting pastime for the kind of warrior/poet/lover he was and that I hoped to become. “Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double-entry accounting,” he says, probably before killing someone with a toothpick. Sadly, when I actually tried to play Go, it turned out be … a