Kenilworth Kibitzer

The other day I borrowed "Starting out: the sicilian dragon" from the massive, Vatican-esque Kenilworth chess library.   I like the Starting Out series a lot.  In a way that few other books do, most books in this series cut a balance between being accessible and providing enough ammunition for you to go to war with your new opening knowledge.  If nothing else, they provide an aesthetically pleasing survey of the basic ideas, and the writing is generally very reader-friendly (it helps that they are written by English grandmasters). However, within this series there is a real imbalance in both quality and breadth.  I was mildly disappointed in "Starting out: the nimzo-indian" because it generally failed to provide any substance beyond move 8 or 9 in many lines, and its overly large type meant that 170 pages felt more like 100.  I think it's suitable maybe all the way through class C play, but after that the lack of depth wilts in the face of tougher competition.  Contrast that with Craig Pritchett's Scheveningen Sicilian book in that same series which uses a slightly smaller font in 200 pages along with substantial GM game analysis to provide a one-stop shopping resource for the opening that I think even experts or masters (I'm speculating here) should find useful.  It stops well before Kasparov and Nikitin's technical level of detail on the subject (as it should) though my one complaint is that the book as a whole is not as accessible to beginners as it perhaps should be.  The book I've seen that hits the golden mean is John Emms' book on the Scotch Game, though he had the benefit of a less expansive topic.