An entertaining portrayal of the esoteric world of chess.
Journalist Chapin makes his book debut with a spirited memoir about his obsession with chess, a game that occupied him for two peripatetic years.
The author first played in high school, when he joined the Pawnishers, “an after-school pack of sweaty teenage boys,” motivated less by a desire to play chess than to “belong to some kind of cadre. Having a ready-made, highly ostentatious identity was socially useful.” Soon, however, he was seduced by the challenge of the game, honing his strategy from Wikipedia and through online matches. He exulted in beating his brilliant older brother, a triumph that proved short-lived when his brother sharpened his own skills. Defeated, Chapin gave up the game until, years later, he sat down at a chess board in the streets of Kathmandu. Quickly, “that old chess feeling was returning—the dizzy pleasure of the potential maneuvers” inviting him “into a tumultuous arena of mental conflict.” That encounter set him off on a quest to become a chess master, with the goal of competing successfully in the Los Angeles Open, an achievement “that would represent a violent assault against the limits of my truly meagre talent.” At the time he reconnected with chess, Chapin was experiencing a vocational crisis, “not entirely convinced by the validity” of being a writer, feeling like “a parasite on my own life. Any compelling character I meet,” he confesses, “excites me not only because they’re exciting but also because I might describe them profitably.” Chess proved to be a great distraction and, soon, an addiction. He joined a chess club and entered competitions in his native Toronto, studied with a “charismatic, frank, and viciously funny” grandmaster in St. Louis, and flew to India, “where chess was born,” to enter a tournament. The author infuses the narrative with exuberant, often funny, anecdotes; glimpses of strategy; and lyrical reflections on why “chess is about the most human thing you can do.”
An entertaining portrayal of the esoteric world of chess.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54517-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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