"The Kings of New York" by Michael Weinreb (Gotham Books, 2007)

Murrow school, a public school in New York, had the best school chess team in the country for a year or so, ahead of many rich schools. Fischer used to live nearby. This book is about that team - bios of the teachers and team members, and the role of chess in schools.

I went to Southern Grammar school, Portsmouth, UK. I was in the chess team and we won the Sunday Times national chess competition for schools. Like Murrow, we had a maths teacher to run the club. Their teacher used publicity to benefit the school (a White House photo-opportunity with George W Bush!) and went to local chess events to head-hunt (Russian immigrants, etc). Money from benefactors was available to run school-age tournaments. In Portsmouth we had the Sir William Dupree tournament offering big prize money.

Murrow school, which promoted independent learning, was indulgent to their best players. I think it was the same at my school. Their best player one year was 48th in the U-16 World Youth Championship - at 15 he was graded 2419. He was 19th in the US championship. We had a special player too, Glenn Lambert, who wasn't very interested in school work.

Alex and Sal were their top two players, with USCF ratings of 2436 and 2453, often 500 points better then their school opponents. Meanwhile they played on the world stage - Alex won the U-16 world championships, improving on Sal's result.

In New York there was a chess-in-the-schools charity encouraging chess in the Bronx, Harlem, etc. In 2003 it gave $3.5m. It had a grass-roots philosophy, not wanting to fund highly rated players.

Some of Murrow's best players were more into online poker than chess. There's a chapter on women in chess. Irina Krush was one of their players - graded 2400+ at 14, winning the US women's championship. There's a section on open-air chess - one of the team members gets $300/week at Washington Square. There's a section about on-line chess.

I think p.189 has a typo - in reply to 1.b4 it says that Black replies "by moving his knight to f7". On p.228 it says "the kids opens with a pawn to d5, and Oscar ... knows he should play pawn to b5.. but .. he plays his knight to f6." which I don't get.