re: Recommend a good book about chess

If you're a relative beginner and want to up your game, work through a tactics book like Fred Reinfeld's "1001 Combination". It'll present you with various themes (fork, skewer, discovered check, etc.). Work through the exercises and your game will get dramatically better. Studying openings is worthless if you can't stop losing pieces every few moves.

If you're beyond that, I suggest a good basic endgame book.

If you just want to read a biography, then Pal Benko's is pretty good. Although out of print, Andrew Soltis' "Soviet Chess" is an outstanding "behind the scenes" history of how the Soviet Union did things as a program.