Even in this era of Game Boys and PlayStations, you can still read an account of Hezbollah's raid across the Israeli border as "Nasrallah's gambit," and you can find descriptions of the response it provoked as "Israel's endgame."
Chess vocabulary forms a metaphorical bridge between a harmless board game of strategy and the strategies of real-life war.
The history of chess is recounted in The Immortal Game, a new book by David Shenk.
To serious chess players, the book's title has an obvious double meaning: It refers to the game itself and also to a particular match that was played by two masters -- Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky -- in London in 1851.
Shenk weaves the story of that match, move by move, throughout the larger story.
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