Mavens will mourn the dearth of move-by-move analysis, but general readers will savor a marvelous portrait of East against...
The BBC journalists who honed their skills in amassing minutiae with Wittgenstein’s Poker (2001) re-create the furor surrounding a chess match that was also one of the Cold War’s most bizarre confrontations.
The attention focused on the 1972 Bobby Fischer–Boris Spassky world championship match in Iceland was extraordinary: Edmonds and Eidinow recount that one reporter hit 21 Manhattan bars and found l8 TVs tuned to PBS, which showed a chess pundit posting teletyped moves on a magnetic board, while only three carried a Mets game. The authors build to a crescendo with other fascinating details, taking the reader inside the two camps in Reykjavik. Spassky got full-time analysis from a whole team of international champions, some of whom had been studying Fischer’s key games for a year, plus a psychologist, a physical trainer, and several KGB operatives traveling under false colors. Fischer’s two assistants, one a grandmaster, were primarily gofers and experienced complainers. Spassky’s congeniality and savoir faire charmed the watching world; Fischer’s constant carping over playing conditions and his outrageous allegations of conspiracy, including possible assassination, dismayed fans even in the US, but the desperate Icelandic organizers bent to his every whim. Finally goaded by a phone call from Henry Kissinger—Nixon was busy pondering the implications of the recent Watergate break-in—Fischer showed up, played a bad first game and lost, then forfeited the second out of sheer petulance. When the magic finally began in game three, Fischer played the brutal, grinding chess that had brought him an unprecedented string of consecutive victories during the two preceding years. In the end it was Spassky who was in psychological shock and the Soviets who claimed (and still maintain) that they were victims of a sinister plot: telepathy, poisoned food, “electronic rays,” anything that would explain their champion’s embarrassing loss.
Mavens will mourn the dearth of move-by-move analysis, but general readers will savor a marvelous portrait of East against West, with perceived societal superiority as the real prize.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-051024-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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