In this biography, Najdorf’s daughter Liliana paints an intimate portrait of her larger-than life father. She writes about him, warts and all, showing us her father as a man both greatly talented and deeply flawed, a man at once loving and rage-prone, noble and petty, generous and selfish, jovial but despotic, earthy but vain, exuberant yet deeply sad.
A genius who could conduct 40 blindfold games simultaneously and memorize long strings of random numbers, yet forgot where he parked his car.
For the English-language edition, Dutch grandmaster Jan Timman has prepared a selection of annotated games and an in-depth foreword. These are complemented nicely by several historical essays, while many photographs round out this engrossing biography of one of the world’s most fascinating chessplayers of the 20th century.