Review_NONFICTION96 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Review_NONFICTION Review_NONFICTIONevents from the paper’s inception in 1852
to its shuttering in 1981, with an emphasis
on the editorial decisions behind the
coverage. The response to Lincoln’s
assassination reveals the workings of a
mid-19th-century newsroom, including a
chilling eyewitness account from the
theater. The paper’s influence is heralded
throughout, exemplified by its lobbying
for the 23rd Amendment that allowed
D.C. citizens to vote for president in 1960.
The Star’s progressive but spotty record
on race features groundbreaking moments
like publishing an NAACP letter during
the 1919 race riots, as well as regrettable
practices such as running real estate ads
that encouraged segregation. A chapter
titled “Murder and Mayhem” includes the
1949 story of demonic possession that
inspired The Exorcist. The postwar political
section details the days after John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, highlighting
the resilience of both reporters and the
Kennedy family. The Vietnam era marked
the paper’s final glory days, with reporters
including Mary McGrory earning spots
on Nixon’s “enemies list.” This astute
history serves as a thorough primer on
Beltway journalism, but the depth of
industry details often overshadows the
excitement of the events themselves.
(Oct.)Lifestyle
Food & Drink
Chinese Takeout Cookbook:
From Wontons to Sweet ’n’ Sour,
Over 70 Recipes to Recreate
Your Favorites
Kwoklyn Wan. Hardie Grant, $22.99 (160p)
ISBN 978-1-78713-419-5
Declaring from the outset that his
debut isn’t meant to be a definitive guide
to Chinese cuisine—it focuses on classic
takeout dishes —U.K. restaurateur and
chef Wan shares his recipes for more than
70 of the most common Chinese dishes in
this solid if unremarkable collection. All
the standards are here: vegetarian spring
rolls, five spice ribs, roast duck, beef with
oyster sauce, chicken chow mein, hot and
sour soup, egg fried rice. Home cooks
may be taken aback by Wan’s heavy-
handed application of cornstarch to
practically every dish, but he argues thatHaving played chess all your life, what
made you want to write about it now?
I fell deeply in love with chess as a
child, and it helped me cope with
growing up and helped me make my
way in the world. But then I gradually
detached from the game. So some of
the need to write the book was making
sense of that process. Why today? I
think the world is difficult to make
sense of for lots of reasons. The kind of
echo that I notice in the
chess world is that the
questioning individual
trying to make sense of a
confusing universe on the
board is a parallel for the
questioning individual
trying to make sense of
the world at large.Why is chess a “meta-
metaphor” for life?
I’ve taken the question of
what chess can teach us about life
quite directly, quite seriously. So, it’s
that concentration is freedom, that it’s
the mattering that matters. Chess is
there as a way into an inquiry to help
us untangle a lot of things, but it’s not
the kind of ultimate thing I’m keen to
discuss.You write that chess can help one
know “what matters.”
This construction of what it means for
something to matter is absolutely cen-
tral to chess, but also to life in general,
I think. I speak of this in terms of a
chess competition, which operates on
the underlying principle of ordering
something with your attention in ahigher-order way. The tension about
mattering that I don’t quite resolve is
between the construction of a self as a
unique individual, and the strain
within Buddhism that says that the self
is ultimately an illusion. I think we
have to hold both these things simulta-
neously—you live your life as if it really
matters, as if every second is precious,
and yet simultaneously know that that’s
not the whole story, that actually you’re
here and gone in the blink
of an eye and the self is an
illusion. It’s a conundrum
right at the heart of life.The influence of your
family and your two
young sons is felt
throughout the book.
How did they figure into
its writing?
I love the intensity of
competition and the sense
that your life is on the line. However, I
think that’s not a full life—it’s more an
initiation into knowing what matters
to you. It’s important to expand beyond
winning and losing. In that context,
experiences like family, where you’re
decentering the self, where it’s not
about you anymore, there’s something
very good about the ego being thinned
out in this way. What I do is try to show
how these things come together, and
the kind of mindset that was at one
point all about getting better at chess
so that I could beat more people, really
became about something more genera-
tive, something more about thinking
about life and society as a whole.
—Molly Gage[Q&A]
PW Talks with Jonathan Rowson
Illusions of Checkmate
In The Moves That Matter (Bloomsbury, Nov.; reviewed on p. 94),
Chess grandmaster and philosopher Rowson applies the logic of chess
to the question, “How does one live a life that matters?”© chrisgloagforopensocietyfoundations