The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, by David Shenk 327pp, Doubleday, $26

The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Oddballs, Geeks, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team, by Michael Weinreb 304pp, Yellow Jersey, £11.99

How Life Imitates Chess, by Garry Kasparov 288pp, Heinemann, £20

David Shenk's The Immortal Game begins with a warning from Albert Einstein. "Chess holds its master in its own bonds, shackling the mind and brain so that the inner freedom of the very strongest must suffer." Shenk sees a close relationship between chess and madness, citing the cases of Paul Morphy (a great 19th-century American player who became a paranoid recluse), Bobby Fischer (20th-century ditto) and the Austrian Wilhelm Steinitz, who became the first official world chess champion in 1886. Steinitz died in New York 14 years later, washed up, broke and probably insane. As Shenk says drily: "He insisted that he had played chess with God over an invisible telephone wire. (God lost.)"

So beware, if you ever become involved in this greatest of games with its infinite variety, rich history and capacity for beauty. The board really is a world, and some players - often misfits in life - prefer not to stray outside it. Former British champion Bill Hartston once observed that "chess doesn't drive people mad, it keeps mad people sane" - an attractive, if contentious, idea. Did chess make Fischer, or break him?

Shenk offers a free-form history of chess that juxtaposes a macro-level narrative of its spread from India and the Middle East to the courts of medieval Europe with a micro-analysis of a famous game played in London in 1851 between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky - the so-called "immortal game", won brilliantly by Anderssen after sacrificing queen, both rooks and a bishop; staggering, inspiring and probably worth going mad for.

American chess has been in decline since Fischer's self-imposed exile in 1975, but that hasn't staunched the flow of chess literature. Michael Weinreb's The Kings of New York appeared in the US last year, and now surfaces here. Weinreb tells the story of the Edward R Murrow School in Brooklyn - a "public" (in US parlance) school founded on laissez-faire principles in 1974 that, up against all manner of elite establishments, has won the national schools chess championship six times, thanks mainly to a maths teacher called Eliot Weiss, who scours New York for prodigies.

Weinreb, too, is attracted by the idea that chess players are innately wacky. "The best players on our team," he quotes Murrow's captain as saying, "are a little bit strange." But this genius-close-to-madness theme can be overplayed: for every player who is crackers, there are a dozen who aren't. Chess is a highly technical game - dependent on calculating variations and working out move sequences - but it is not inherently intellectual. Neither genius nor madness is a prerequisite for playing it well, though boys (and the occasional girl) who enjoy making scale models of the Eiffel Tower using matchsticks are likely to do well.

Weinreb's book, like Shenk's, is aimed at a general audience who, while knowing the moves and having perhaps briefly been captivated (or appalled) by Fischer, are not familiar with the quirks of top-level chess. The danger with this generalist approach is that the tyros are not quite hauled in (will they really want to know this much about US schools chess?), while aficionados are talked down to. Weinreb spells out what stalemate means, and feels he must remind us that Capablanca - the most charismatic chess player of all time - was a grandmaster from Cuba. Every move is explained, which makes for a laborious game.

Both books are the work of journalists who got hooked on chess. They are written from the outside looking in, which is why they play up the loopiness. Thus Steinitz, dying in madness and poverty, is the archetype, rather than, say, current world champion Vladimir Kramnik, polite, understated and as colourless - and icily accurate - as your average actuary.

Garry Kasparov is a pretty sane guy, too - driven, egoistical, intense, but certainly not mad. He was world champion from 1985 to 2000, and is the highest-rated player of all time. The sport is still coming to terms with his sudden retirement two years ago, and his genius and charisma are sorely missed. He is attempting to build a career in Russian politics, and in How Life Imitates Chess outlines the lessons he will be applying beyond the board - play your own game, adopt a consistent strategy, worry about yourself rather than your rivals, trust your intuition, never be frightened to innovate, accept that crises are inevitable and use them to become stronger.

The book is a curious amalgam of autobiography, self-help guide and chess history. It doesn't quite work on any of those levels and is wildly overpriced at £20, but Kasparov at least offers an insider's take on chess nuttiness. "In many western nations the stereotype of the chess player is often synonymous with the underfed weakling or the brainy-but-misanthropic nerd," he writes, before enumerating the usual suspects - Morphy, Steinitz, Fischer and the great Polish player Akiba Rubinstein, who "after making a move ... would hide in the corner of the playing hall awaiting his opponent's reply".

Novels and films about the game, especially Nabokov's The Luzhin Defence, have focused on eccentrics, leading to a popular assumption that all chess players are bonkers. But Kasparov takes a more prosaic view. "Exceptional cases like these ... make it easy to ignore the vast majority of chess players who are entirely unexceptional apart from their capacity to play chess well." Just because there are some mad chess players doesn't mean all chess players are mad.

· Stephen Moss, the Guardian chess champion, once defeated grandmaster John Nunn. (Nunn was playing 29 other people at the time)