DESCRIPTIVE NOTATION. Without this, I would five it five stars. I tried to get the original — it's algebraic — but that's just impossible to find in the US. Nevertheless, I got this book for a steal at a chess tournament, and while the descriptive notation is an obstacle (it's easy to make mistakes and hard to follow variations) it's not insurmountable.
Once you get past that, you get very clear and instructive games. The first few seem casual games with the co-author, Walter Meiden but as you get deeper in the book, Euwe seems to be pulling more and more from the many simultaneous displays he did.
Euwe was a humble man but his writing and sharp, precise, and sometimes a touch condescending. He'll complain about amateurs to resigning in lost positions during simultaneous sessions and how he'd go for a more complex checkmate instead of a simple endgame, just to speed things up. Between the lines you can read it's 10 pm and I'm here in Meppel and I have to teach Math in Amsterdam tomorrow morning so hurry up!" — whoi can blame him?
The paper edition is great, I've heard some complaints about unreadable diagrams and while not top qualtiy,m they're clearly readable in the book., Some my call it laziness on the publisher side to reuse the old diagrams, but there's something classy about those 1950s diagrams that I love.
All in all, this book is rightfully a classic. The games are enjoyable to replay and ponder what *you* would do in a position. Even with the descriptive notation (the thing preventing the fifth star) well worth a read.
