Informed, thorough, sympathetic and surpassingly sad.
The teenage prodigy, the eccentric champion, the irascible anti-Semite, the genius, the pathetic paranoid—these and other Bobby Fischers strut and fret their hour upon celebrity’s stage.
Chess Life founding publisher Brady (Communications/St. John’s Univ.; The Publisher, 2000, etc.), who knew his subject well—and wrote about him in Bobby Fischer: Profile of a Prodigy (1965)—is generous, but never to a fault, with Robert James Fischer, who died in 2008 at 64. The author begins with Fischer’s 2004 arrest and incarceration in Tokyo (an event to which he returns toward the end of the book), then segues to Fischer’s background, specifically the story of his Swiss mother, who married a man in Moscow while she was working on her medical degree. When he was six, Fischer received his first chess set from his sister. A ferocious autodidact, he taught himself the game, read every chess publication he could and rose spectacularly, if erratically, through the chess ranks. He tolerated school only for a while (Barbara Streisand was a high-school classmate) and won his first United States championship at 14. Brady, who was present in Reykjavík for the 1972 World Championship match between Fisher and Boris Spassky, writes compassionately about Fischer’s bizarre behavior and demands then (he very nearly withdrew from the competition), but the author’s allegiance to his subject weakens thereafter. Fischer became increasingly paranoid and isolated in the ensuing decades, descending into mad theories and openly embracing ludicrous notions (Holocaust denial, for example). He gave numerous bizarre radio interviews, including one on the heels of 9/11 that is a classic of crudity. After his release from the Japanese jail, no one really wanted him. He lived in Iceland, then soured on it, alienating, as was his lifelong wont, a source of refuge.
Informed, thorough, sympathetic and surpassingly sad.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46390-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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