I saw this book over the holidays when shopping for gifts for other people and had to pick it up for myself (and for my boyfriend if he wants to read it).
It is a really fascinating history of how and why we have such a powerful female piece on the chess board (the queen) who was not even present for several centuries of the game's history... (originally in the Middle East this piece was a male vizier who was much weaker, only moving one space diagonally).
She's a senior scholar at Stanford's Institute for Women and Gender who has written extensively on women's history, and she did a great job of telling her own story of first becoming intrigued by this question and then going through her own research to get closer to the answer.
The book also talks a lot about how chess was played over the years -- it was a metaphor for courtship and love at some points - so that a couple shown playing chess in a medieval tapestry were not seen to "just" be playing chess...
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