bookpagedev

by Michael Alec Rose

A boy grows up to the age of eight in a central Pennsylvania town, never knowing anything beyond the world of family, church, school a human world, with purely human concerns. But when the family moves to a town near Long Island Sound, the boy wanders off into the Connecticut woods rising near his front door, into a thicket, then into a swamp. When he spots his first turtle, the jolt of wonder and recognition staggers him. Here, in this new world, “all the more miraculous for being real,” he knows he has come home at last.

David M. Carroll was that boy, and has remained that boy all through the years of his grown-up achievements as naturalist, artist and author. In this radiant memoir, he shares a lifetime of abiding passions for nature, art, teaching and a few kindred human souls. In the telling, Carroll magically collapses time into one ever-renewing turtle cycle of hibernation, nesting and hatching. Before encountering this book, anyone might naturally laugh with scorn at the notion that a walk into a wetland to look for turtles could be a thrilling thing to read about, fraught with anxiety and delight. Scorn turns to amazement, though, as Carroll takes hold of the reader as surely as he picks up one of his slow, spotted friends to examine its underside (called plastron, as we gratefully learn). “Eccentric” is a word often applied to someone like Carroll or his beloved literary mentor, Thoreau. The word simply means “off-center.” Self-Portrait with Turtles joins Walden, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a handful of other great books which reconfigure the center where it has always been, with the Earth herself and with her creatures. Human beings, even the most urban of us, rightly belong in that company, but in our mad haste, we have gone “eccentric,” away from our natural home. Carroll wants to bring us back. But it is hard, and it is late, for the natural world is already so terribly diminished by what we have wrought upon it in the name of progress. Like his three earlier books (The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections and Swampwalker’s Journal, together called the Wet Sneakers Trilogy), Carroll’s memoir is in part an elegy for what has been lost. Here is a man who loves people as much as he loves turtles it’s mankind he can’t stand.

Michael Alec Rose is a music professor at Vanderbilt University.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Eminent domains

Review by bookpagedev

by Julie Hale

There’s no denying that Southern authors are uniquely bound to their home turf just think about the kind of writer William Faulkner might have become if he’d been born someplace besides Mississippi. In Writers of the American South: Their Literary Landscapes, the remarkable relationship between Southern authors and their native soil comes alive as 12 popular novelists take readers on a tour of their home regions, revealing what they love best about the towns where they live and providing fascinating insights into their domestic routines and work habits. Pat Conroy, Barry Hannah, Josephine Humphreys and Ann Patchett, among other authors, demonstrate some good old-fashioned hospitality and offer fans a peek inside their private residences. From the majestic, museum-like manor with gothic accents maintained by Allan Gurganus in Falls, North Carolina, to the two-story hurricane-proof bunker bright, airy and built on stilts overlooking Florida Bay, where Carl Hiaasen does his work, each place is unforgettable in its own way.

Acclaimed architectural writer Hugh Howard provided the volume’s delightful text, while Roger Straus III son of the publishing giant who co-founded Farrar, Straus and Giroux contributed elegant, evocative photos. With 21 stops on their itinerary, including the estates of late authors like Kate Chopin and Flannery O’Connor, the pair traveled more than 10,000 miles to complete the book. The result: a magnificent showcase of the places Southern writers call home and a loving act of literary preservation.

Julie Hale keeps her old copies of The New Yorker in Austin, Texas.

There's no denying that Southern authors are uniquely bound to their home turf just think about the kind of writer William Faulkner might have become if he'd been born someplace besides Mississippi. In Writers of the American South: Their Literary Landscapes, the remarkable relationship between…

Religion & Spirituality

Religion & Spirituality

Seeking a soulful, spiritual connection

Review by bookpagedev

Thomas Moore, author of the best-selling Care of the Soul, now presents a long-awaited companion book, The Soul’s Religion: Cultivating a Profoundly Spiritual Way of Life. In a time of heightened interest in spiritual themes, The Soul’s Religion offers a substantive and unique perspective on the subject. A psychotherapist, lecturer and former Catholic monk, Moore has a varied background with degrees in theology, musicology and philosophy. The culmination of life experience and ideas, as well as Moore’s own personal spiritual odyssey, provide the foundation for this extraordinary book. The content is rich and personal, and new insights and meaning are found with each reading. As Moore described in Care of the Soul, the soul is nourished by a vital spiritual experience. Without this connection a person cannot enjoy all that life has to offer. In his new book, he elaborates further on lessons involved in the cultivation of spirituality with a series of interesting and nontraditional meditations. His approach involves the acceptance of wonder and uncertainty, and a willingness to move through life without a plan or goal, recognizing mystery as the real substance of a spiritual and religious existence. He describes alchemy as a natural process of transformation and spiritual depth, beginning with a descent into the stuff of everyday life, but ending with the release of the winged spirit and an effective way towards a fullness of spirit.

According to Moore, the spirit is not always found in a positive quest for meaning sometimes it occurs only after we have been broken and torn apart by failure and sadness. As Moore sees it, God is to be found in the thick of life or not at all. Moore confesses that the religion he envisions in this book is difficult to spell out. Nevertheless, his meaningful presentation is masterful and powerful, in no small measure because the author is intimately acquainted with the lessons himself. In this provocative book, the reader is challenged to re-imagine how a rich and personal spiritual life can be within the grasp of every seeker. Karen Jenks is a nurse in Nashville.

Thomas Moore, author of the best-selling Care of the Soul, now presents a long-awaited companion book, The Soul's Religion: Cultivating a Profoundly Spiritual Way of Life. In a time of heightened interest in spiritual themes, The Soul's Religion offers a substantive and unique perspective on…

Biography

Biography

Breaking free of prison walls

Review by bookpagedev

There are more than two million adults in prison today in the United States. Nearly all of them will be released back into society sooner or later, with most of those eventually returning to prison. How will they make it? Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett, a powerful new book by Jennifer Gonnerman offers an unvarnished glimpse into the life of one of these former prisoners. It joins a growing list of literature emerging on the issue of prisoner re-entry.

Gonnerman is a staff writer for the Village Voice, and this book grew out of her reporting on the impact of mandatory prison sentencing for drug offenders in New York state. She met Elaine Bartlett in 1998 while interviewing prisoners serving long prison time for first-time drug dealing. Bartlett was 14 years into a 20-year term. Bartlett grew up in the public housing projects of New York. She was one of seven children in a family with no father. Two of her siblings would serve prison time; one would die violently. The others struggled with drug addictions or other urban ills, and most never finished high school. Bartlett would have four children by two men, one of whom was Bartlett’s partner in crime. Upon release from prison, Bartlett struggles to find work, get reacquainted with children she does not know, maintain housing for her and her family and remain free.

Gonnerman’s non-judgmental writing style allows Bartlett’s story to unfold on its own. The story is compelling; the picture created is not pretty. Should drug-sentencing laws be reformed? Probably, but changing those laws provides no solution for individuals participating in a subculture that encourages families without fathers, easy access to drugs and a complete absence of work ethic in short, a purposeless life. Bartlett stays out of prison in part because of her dedication to reform drug sentencing; the tragedy is that most of her former prison compatriots will not. J. Campbell Green has worked with ex-prisoners for more than 20 years and previously managed a halfway house program.

Arts & Culture, Literature

Literature Arts & Culture

Everybody loves Raymond

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Raymond Chandler wrote like the quintessential man’s man. His novels, such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, gave us hardboiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe chasing bad guys and consorting with dangerous dames, and doing it all in some of the most colorful, first-person-narrative verbal fillips ever created. With that in mind, editor Martin Asher has pulled together Philip Marlowe’s Guide to Life: A Compendium of Quotations by Raymond Chandler. Asher draws from the Chandler oeuvre and serves up keenly evocative quotable quotes, arranged topically from A-to-Z (in this case, from Advertising to Writers). Laced with singular wit and a deliciously cynical world view, these carefully chosen snippets of the Chandler genius are also often mercifully brief. For example, on marriage: For two people in a hundred it’s wonderful. Or, on coffee: I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race. A terrific gift idea for that literary, or maybe just very jaded, male.

Raymond Chandler wrote like the quintessential man's man. His novels, such as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, gave us hardboiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe chasing bad guys and consorting with dangerous dames, and doing it all in some of the most colorful, first-person-narrative…

Fiction, Poetry

Fiction Poetry

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

Review by bookpagedev

by Kate Daniels

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot’s dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even crueler paradoxically enough because of the Academy of American Poets’ proclamation of it as National Poetry Month.

While the brief and slightly heightened attention paid to poetry during these 30 days is, of course, welcome, it also serves to remind us of the diminishment of poetry in our time. Just as we need Black History Month or National Women’s History Month to remind us of the historical invisibility of particular populations, we apparently require a special month for poetry. Or perhaps the situation is more dire than that. Could it be that National Poetry Month is as necessary National Breast Cancer Awareness Month as a kind of public service attempt to decrease a high mortality rate? However we may view the privileging of the form during the month of April, it is always a relief to come upon truly excellent and profoundly readable volumes of poetry that offer the promise of winning audiences back to the genre. Here are three.

In <!–BPLINK=0618152857–>Song ∧ Dance<!–ENDBPLINK–> (Houghton Mifflin, $22, 80 pages, ISBN 0618152857), Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. "Did you ever have a family?" he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <!–BPLINK=0374263027–>A Short History of the Shadow<!–ENDBPLINK–> (Farrar, Straus, $20, 96 pages, ISBN 0374263027), gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, The Seconds, gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.

Don't be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry For those of us who write poetry, this time of year is always occasion to reflect upon T.S. Eliot's dictum that "April is the cruelest month." For the past decade or so, April has become even…

A physicist’s tour of the universe

Review by bookpagedev

As the world enters what many consider to be the golden age of cosmology, physicist Brian Greene once again explores the secrets of the universe in an accessible new book that even the non-scientist can appreciate. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality focuses on the search for the physicist’s holy grail—a unified theory of the universe that works from the grandest of scales to the most minute.

Greene’s first book, The Elegant Universe, a bestseller and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, inspired a PBS series that aired last fall. As a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and an expert in string theory, he works on cutting-edge developments in particle and theoretical physics. The Fabric of the Cosmos focuses on recent advances toward attaining a unified theory of the universe and offers an overview of the historical paths taken so far to reach that goal.

It is no small task to relay ideas about the flow of time, relativity and quantum theory in a book that contains no equations, outlandishly technical terms or far-fetched reasoning. Greene’s passion for his subject allows him to accomplish these feats using only superbly written explanations, excellent illustrations and simple analogies that use such objects as a bucket of water and Bart Simpson’s skateboard.

By using science’s past accomplishments and failures as a foundation, The Fabric of the Cosmos allows the reader to understand immensely complex issues like the inflation of the universe and the 11 dimensions of superstring theory. And best of all, Greene shows patience for the reader who may be struggling to visualize subatomic particles or the strings of energy that compose them.

With additional notes for each chapter and a complete glossary, this book can bring readers up to date on the research into the forces that shaped our universe.

Coy Martin is a writer in Nashville.

Humor, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Humor

Get their motors running

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

BBC writer and car buff Richard Porter takes another, decidedly different, view of automobiles with his Crap Cars, a delightful photo-and-text rundown of 50 of the more lamentable models foisted on an unsuspecting public from the ’60s to the ’90s. For the American audience, Porter’s coverage might lean too often on European cars, since few of us on this side of the Atlantic would be familiar with the Aston Martin Lagonda or the Maserati Biturbo. But plenty of us know a crap car when we see it (or have owned or driven one), and we know exactly what Porter means when he sarcastically weighs in against such monstrosities as the AMC Gremlin, the Ford Pinto, the Chrysler K-Car, the Chevrolet Citation or the Yugo GV. The VW Beetle also comes under particular heavy attack, which only proves that a crap car can have a marketing life of nearly 40 years. Crap Cars is fun reading and a nice visual spike for nostalgia buffs.

Martin Brady is making out his Christmas list at home in Nashville.

Fiction, Poetry

Fiction Poetry

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

Review by bookpagedev

by Kate Daniels

Charles Wright’s new volume, A Short History of the Shadow, gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <!–BPLINK=0399147861–>The Seconds<!–ENDBPLINK–> (Putnam, $24, 88 pages, ISBN 0399147861), gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.

Biography

Biography

Testing the taboos of Charleston

Review by bookpagedev

by Lynn Hamilton

Fame eluded Gordon Langley Hall as a writer, even though he was a prolific scribbler of memoirs and novels. When he became one of the first people to undergo sex change surgery in America, Hall’s local notoriety in Charleston, South Carolina, was unpleasantly mixed with malicious gossip. Edward Ball’s new book, Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love, may give Hall, now dead, the recognition that eluded him in life. Ball (author of the National Book Award winner Slaves in the Family) set out to settle two mysteries that have circled one of Charleston’s most celebrated and outrageous personalities for decades. Was Hall, as he claimed, a hermaphrodite who was misidentified as a male at birth? And did Hall, as he also claimed, conceive and give birth to a daughter, Natasha? Ball’s quest to resolve these burning issues takes him from Charleston to England where, as a child of the servant class, Hall had few opportunities for economic and social mobility. Then the biographer tracks his subject to New York where Hall became the protege and, at least in some sense, the lover of Isabel Whitney, an heir to the cotton gin fortune. His liaison with Whitney, perhaps more than his subsequent sex change, altered Hall’s life forever. When she died, his mistress made him a millionaire. As a Charleston transplant, Hall charmed local society with his English accent. Charlestonians, Ball indicates, didn’t pick up on the cockney overtones that would have made Ball’s attempts to penetrate the upper classes a wash back in England. Then, perversely, Hall throws away his tenuous new foothold in the Charleston party circuit by changing his gender from male to female and re-emerging as “Dawn.” As painted by Ball, Charleston’s high society was far too prudish and inflexible to get over that one. Then, having forever trespassed on good taste, Hall takes his adventure one or two steps further. He marries an African-American man and appears to bear his new husband a child. Ball first gets a clue that Hall might be inventing fictions about himself when it turns out that Hall forged a document shaving 15 years off his age. From there, Ball is the relentless sleuth, separating fantasy from fact until he has the real story on Gordon Hall, alias Dawn Simmons. He interviews dozens of eccentric characters who knew Hall, and the tale of each informant is a story unto itself.

Echoing the formula of John Berendt’s best-selling Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Ball’s Peninsula of Lies is a must-read for people who enjoy well-crafted Southern storytelling. Lynn Hamilton is a writer in Tybee Island, Georgia.

Arts & Culture, Photography

Photography Arts & Culture

Get their motors running

Review by bookpagedev

by Martin Brady

Yet another volume distinguished by marvelous photography is Porsche 911: Perfection by Design. Car historian Randy Leffingwell provides the ample text, but he also shares the photo-taking duties with David Newhardt. The result is around 300 color and black-and-white shots of this hot-blooded Porsche sports car, from the early forerunners that first appeared in the 1950s, to the beginning of its distinctively long 40-year run in the 1960s (with the Type 901), on to the present 2005 models. Leffingwell’s words provide the inside scoop on the vision behind the inspired aesthetic and technical design of the 911, drawing upon interviews with dozens of Porsche engineers and executives as well as competitors who were admittedly influenced by the automobile’s powerful, sleek image and its nonpareil manual-shift high performance. Casual car buffs might get a little daunted by Leffingwell’s discussion of things like digital engine management systems, while full-blown gearheads will be solidly engaged. But everyone will revel in the views of the various incarnations of this incredibly stylish car through the decades, distinguished by subtle, tasteful body tweaks and carefully thought-out mechanical enhancements, resulting in ultra-cool specific models such as the Turbo, the Carrera, the Cabriolet and the Speedster, many produced in limited editions and carrying price tags of upwards of $200,000. If you could afford one, you’d surely buy it, and this gorgeous volume shows why.

Martin Brady is making out his Christmas list at home in Nashville.

Fiction, Poetry

Fiction Poetry

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

Review by bookpagedev

by Kate Daniels

In Song ∧ Dance, Alan Shapiro continues the beautifully agonizing chronicle of the demise of his family. Earlier works have addressed the death of his sister from cancer and the aging of his parents. "Did you ever have a family?" he asks himself in the title poem. This new volume takes as its subject the struggle of the poet’s brother, David Shapiro, with an incurable brain cancer. It is almost unbelievable that any one family should have suffered from terminal illness to the extent that Shapiro’s has. And yet, Shapiro’s real contribution lies in showing us how ordinary his family’s suffering ultimately is. His poems impress upon us his vision of the great, ongoing human misery, and how that misery can be balanced out by the loving and loyal attentiveness of family and friends who stay the course. In the inventive, well-wrought forms of these poems, Shapiro reveals the company and solace that can be offered the dying and the bereaved. "By god it’s summer and/you’ve cleared the bases," he says in "Up Against." "There’s no one out./The inning could go on forever." With the testimony of poems like these, the author’s brother is sure to "go on forever," and in that way no one shall ever lose him.

Charles Wright’s new volume, <!–BPLINK=0374263027–>A Short History of the Shadow<!–ENDBPLINK–> (Farrar, Straus, $20, 96 pages, ISBN 0374263027), gives us his familiar, laconically philosophical voice and the long, limpid lines for which he has become famous. Though Wright is known for his elegant ruminations on nostalgia and the mysterious passing of time, this volume, with its plethora of seasonal allusions and insistent referencing of times and images past, has an even more elegiac cast than his earlier work. Perhaps it is the titling of one section, "Millennium blues" or even our realization of the poet’s age (67 this year), that makes these poems sound almost like a last will and testament. "I think of nightfall all the time," he says in one poem. This is a hauntingly lovely volume of mature ruminations on memory, aging and the inevitable, but not unfriendly, approach of death by a poet who has lived richly, courageously and with profound dedication to the unsentimental practice of his art. In her six volumes of poetry, Linda Bierds has revealed herself as one of the most imaginatively interesting of the mid-generation of American poets. Her most recent book, <!–BPLINK=0399147861–>The Seconds<!–ENDBPLINK–> (Putnam, $24, 88 pages, ISBN 0399147861), gives us more examples of her sure hand with imagery and the delicate voicing she brings to narrative. Here, the poems often originate in a painting or in the details of an artist’s or a writer’s life Vermeer, Marie Curie, Andrew Wyeth, Zelda Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka and they are alive with the narrative imagery that Beirds is so good at evoking. This is a book for readers who love to lose themselves in the minutiae of poems constructed around a substantial thematic core. Decorative and detailed, Bierds’ poems do not stop there, but address themselves to subjects that resonate with the realities of contemporary readers’ lives. Kate Daniels is a poet who teaches in the English Department at Vanderbilt University.

History

History

A Cold War clash on the chessboard

Review by bookpagedev

by James Webb

During the Cold War, generations grew up with the knowledge that one mistake by those in power could doom the entire planet. When the other side is prepared to destroy you utterly, you tend to view every conflict as life or death. The Olympics, for instance, were much more than athletic competitions during that era they were ideological battlegrounds. So it was somehow appropriate that in 1972, in the waning days of the superpower struggle, a chess competition between an American and a Russian focused the world’s attention on the chilly environs of Reykjavik, Iceland.

Bobby Fischer Goes To War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (the authors of the surprise 2001 hit book, Wittgenstein’s Poker) is a detailed account of the most famous chess match in modern times, and a fascinating story it is. What should have been a straightforward us-against-them-morality tale was turned on its head by the personalities of the participants. The Soviet Grandmaster Boris Spassky was handsome, well spoken, gracious and self-effacing, while the American, Bobby Fischer, was a rude, greedy, tantrum-throwing bully. That Fischer was a genius at chess who was playing for “our” side was beside the point many Americans at the time were rooting against him.

Using various sources, including contemporary interviews with many participants, documents that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union and U.S. material obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, Edmonds and Eidinow explore the background of each man. Spassky, while a star at chess, was hardly a poster-boy for the Soviet system. Much to the consternation of his superiors, he often was more concerned with his game than his ideology, and he openly flaunted the rules most Soviet citizens lived by. Fischer was a rule-breaker as well; with his enormous talent, he demanded and got special treatment from tournament committees around the world, alienating almost everyone with whom he came into contact. While Spassky’s faux pas could be shrugged off due to his distracted nature, Fischer’s actions were more calculated, and as the authors show us, his irritating behavior reached unbelievable heights at the World Championships in Iceland.

Swirling around the two grandmasters’ gamesmanship were their respective governments. Henry Kissinger personally pleaded with Fischer to take the fight to the Soviets, while at the same time the American embassy was hoping the contest would end quickly, before Fischer damaged foreign relations irreparably. The Russian contingent in Iceland increased dramatically during the match, from psychiatrists surreptitiously analyzing Fischer to KGB agents examining Spassky’s food. In truth, they had good reason to worry about Spassky his health fluctuated during the tournament but they should have looked no further than Fischer’s antics to determine the cause of Spassky’s angst. Fischer objected to the auditorium, the lights, the cameras, the size of the audience, the amount of prize money, the noise level, the color of the chess board and on and on; the psychological stress on Spassky must have been tremendous. Considering his tactics, Fisher’s eventual victory was not surprising.

Fischer’s “take no prisoners” attitude the attitude we celebrate every day in American sports, from headfirst slides in baseball to strutting end-zone celebrations leaves a bitter taste in this particular contest. It’s hard to feel any joy at Fischer’s victory over Spassky, especially in light of Spassky’s gracious defeat and Fischer’s eventual emergence as a Nazi apologist.

Bobby Fischer Goes To War takes a compelling look inside the world of high-stakes chess and recalls the fears and suspicions that marked a dangerous era in world history. James Neal Webb plays chess though not very well in Nashville.

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bookpagedev

A passion for the natural world

Eminent domains

Seeking a soulful, spiritual connection

Breaking free of prison walls

Everybody loves Raymond

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

A physicist’s tour of the universe

Get their motors running

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

Testing the taboos of Charleston

Get their motors running

Don’t be cruel: appreciating the year-round joys of poetry

A Cold War clash on the chessboard

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