In the fall of 1900, Dr. Gustav Uyterhoeven left the chess garden that he and his wife, Sonja, had created together in Dayton, Ohio, and journeyed to South Africa to serve as a doctor in the British concentration camps of the Boer War. Over the next ten months he sent twelve chess pieces and twelve letters back to Sonja.
She set out her husband's gifts as they arrived and welcomed all the most faithful guests of the garden to come and hear what he had written - letters which told nothing of his experience of the camps but described an imagined land called the Antipodes, where all the game pieces that cluttered the sets and drawers of the garden collection came to life to guide the doctor through his fateful and wondrous last adventure.
Brooks Hansen offers a tale of spiritual progress disguised in the most exotic visions of the imagination. And yet The Chess Garden encompasses a very real world, too. Alongside the doctor's visions of the Antipodes, the story of his life gradually unfolds as well. History and allegory are expertly woven until finally both lead back to the chess garden itself, a place where ideas give way to vision, reason meets faith, and fact and figment are finally reconciled.

Hansen, Brooks, 1965-

New York: Riverhead Books

Longman Publishing

1st Riverhead trade pbk. ed, First Edition, PS, 1996

United States, United States of America

Set Scanfee to 100 on all Pre-June IA Sponsored Books as per Robert

[curator]venus@archive.org[/curator][date]20111004134123[/date][state]approved[/state]

In the 19th Century, a doctor from Dayton, Ohio, volunteers his services for the Boer War in South Africa. From there he sends his family letters on an imaginary world populated by chess pieces and describes his adventures among them

2023-06-28