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
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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