Excellent Morphy book

Anyone interested in history of chess and/or Morphy should check out Paul Morpy: A Modern Perspective by Valeri Beim. Here's a guy who beat the pants off everyone in the U.S., then went to Europe and beat their pants off too. The book deals mainly with his games against recognized masters of the time: Paulsen, Harrwitz, Boden, Anderssen. In playing through the games I learned quite a bit. One, Morphy had to struggle against these opponents, they were no pushovers. Two, in almost all the matches he started off with losing games, absorbed what his opponents had to offer, then steamrollered them for there on. Three, Morphy had a narrow, almost stubbornly retro attitude toward openings (hated Sicilian). Four, despite being the best, he contributed almost nothing to theory, never wrote a book or expounded his ideas about chess. Personally, he was frail, frequently ill, child-like in stature, delicate, almost feminine. He had astonishing memory, visualization skills. Beim likes to call his talent intuitive, which I think begs the question of his skills. Unfortunately, we have little of Morphy's private thoughts to go on, just his games.

Sounds like an awesome book, I'm gonna have to pick this one up. Morphy is one my favorite players of all time, and I too hate the Sicilian.

The book has a lot of text (always a good sign) and some fresh analysis of familiar and not so familiar Morphy games. Thanks for the suggestion.