Book excerpt: This Damon Runyan-like work will be around well into the Twenty-first Century to inform future chess generations about such greats as Bobby Fischer and world champion Gary Kasparov as well as the "guys and dolls" of the New York chess scene during the fabled Golden Era of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet there is plenty of hard chess in this big book - over 300 games and positions, many never before published, and which contain interesting opening ideas that have either been forgotten or neglected in the manuals.