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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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