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David Shenk opens his history of chess with a disturbing portrait of the artist Marcel Duchamp, who moved from painting (Nude Descending a Staircase) to conceptual art before devoting much his life to the pursuit of beauty at the chessboard.

The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain By David Shenk Doubleday 352 pp.; $26

To casual players, Duchamp's decision may seem ludicrous. Why give up a critically acclaimed art career in order to spend every waking moment poring over a little checkered board? But this is Shenk's point. He wants to provoke us to question our accepted scale of values, our condescension to chess as a mere game. (Of course, Duchamp's case also has to do with a radical revaluation of "art," but that's another story.)

Beginning with Duchamp, Shenk's book pushes the reader to appreciate the game's deep history and the profound aesthetic and social questions that it raises. Shenk's hyperbolic subtitle encapsulates his own view of the game's value. Alas, his journalistic style has difficulty bearing the weight of his own thesis. Shenk is attempting to establish a layman's road map through the complex world of chess, but he seems crippled by the op-ed instinct, sometimes painting his own conclusions on the subject as if they were obvious and indisputable.

In chapter 12, for example, Shenk attempts to connect chess to public education, emphasizing the game's value as an indispensable tool for the mental fitness that is necessary to compete in today's world. He reports on his visit to a New York public school, where he interviewed a chess teacher and sat in on several chess classes. Shenk observes the hesitant, bumbling attempts at pawn-play by the second-grade novices and then fast-forwards to the excited game analysis and concentrated thought demonstrated by the advanced fourth- and fifth-grade class. Inspired by the enthusiasm of the advanced class and impressed by their proficiency in the language of the game, Shenk ends the chapter with confident assertions of the ability of chess to mentally prepare young people for the meritocracy of the global economy.

And that's not the only reason to make chess a part of the curriculum. Chess, it turns out, is also an antidote to "fundamentalism." Indeed, Shenk gets a bit carried away at the end of chapter 12, preaching a standard postmodern mini-sermon against the follies of "fundamentalist ideologues" who "stop thinking" simply because the truth has become "slippery." In contrast, he claims, the emphasis chess places on flexible problem-solving could be an important part of our public education, fitting our children to avoid fundamentalist beliefs as well as preparing them to compete in the global marketplace.

Hmmm. As a sport, chess may indeed instill good mental habits in its practitioners, but will those practitioners ever have access to the educational and entrepreneurial opportunities necessary to achieve success in the global environment? Russia, probably the most chess-infused state on earth, is also famed for its corruption and the tremendous concentration of economic power in a few hands. While the Russian chess machine is fearsome over the board, the millions of Russian pawn-pushers have hardly overwhelmed the Russian economy with their transferable skills, nor have Russian chess players astonished the world with their staunch commitment to the flexible thinking championed by postmodern humanism. If anything, Russia appears to have experienced a modest religious revival, with many young people returning to their Christian roots.

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