The portrait of his father is decidedly unpleasant, and Hoffman himself has some jarringly boastful moments, but those who...
A journey into the psyche of champion chess players, accompanied by a personal quest for understanding of a talented but difficult parent.
Introduced to chess by his father when he was only five, Hoffman (Wings of Madness, 2003, etc.) found a refuge in the game during an adolescence marked by family stress. Returning to the game decades later in a period of personal and professional crisis, he found himself fascinated not just by chess itself, but by the inner life of its players. Among the questions he seeks to answer are why chess is so addictive, how the champions handle victory and defeat and why the game is played primarily by men. There’s a bit of chess history and mythology, a brief explanation of the rules and of some opening moves and a side trip into human-vs.-computer competition, but this is primarily a narrative driven by personality. In 2004, Hoffman accompanied grandmasters Joel Lautier and Pascal Charbonneau to international competitions in Moscow and Libya respectively to observe how these men prepared for matches and how they handled winning and losing. A year later, he journeyed to Athens to interview another grandmaster, Nigel Short. The Libyan trip with Lautier, which included nerve-shattering encounters with a police-state bureaucracy, reveals the author’s expertise as a storyteller as well as his own high-amateur competence at the chessboard. Woven together with these forays into the minds of chess professionals are Hoffman’s reminiscences about his father, an extremely manipulative and competitive man, envious of his teenage son’s accomplishments, who once suggested that chess was really a way of working out homo-patricidal impulses.
The portrait of his father is decidedly unpleasant, and Hoffman himself has some jarringly boastful moments, but those who relished Stefan Fatsis’s portrayal of Scrabble junkies (Word Freak, 2001) will find this another fascinating glimpse into a competitive game world filled with quirky and brilliant addicts.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0097-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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