An inside look at the 1993 chess match between Englishman Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov, from a longtime chess correspondent and confidant of Short's. Lawson delivers an intimate record of the first westerner's challenge for the world championship since the legendary Bobby Fischer. The match was played before London television cameras and treated by the English press as if it were Wimbledon. End Game penetrates to the inner game, a battle of individual wills. Short, a slight, bespectacled Lancashire man, rose out of England's amateur chess league as a child prodigy; Kasparov, rigorously trained in the Soviet system from childhood, was the reigning world champion. Lawson presents their contest as one between two antithetical philosophies, styles, and temperaments (as well as countries). With privileged information, he describes a suspenseful preliminary struggle, including the machinations of FidÇ, the world chess organization, against which Short and the famously fickle Kasparov joined in an uneasy alliance, forming their own players' association to sanction their championship match in London. In tellingly contrasted methods of preparation, Kasparov sequestered himself on a Croatian island with a retinue of three Russian grandmaster coaches, while Short crammed with a Czech grandmaster (whom he patricidally fired during the match itself) and shuttled between his coach in suburban Virginia and his family in Athens. Lawson, an unapologetic Short partisan, is unwaveringly loyal; his remarks about Short's enemies, whether in Kasparov's camp or in the British press, are sometimes abrasive and gratuitous. He is, however, objective enough as a chess correspondent to analyze Short's blunders (there is an appendix of each game in standard algebraic notation) and let him make his own excuses, which he rarely did. Although the games Short played will not make any anthologies, the playing of them as recounted here has wrenching immediacy, conveying the tension of every ploy, bluff, miscalculation, and inspired gambit.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59810-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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