Bobby Fischer Goes to War : How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

Rating:
Summary: Straightforward Accont of a Memorable Story
Review: "Bobby Fischer Goes to War" succinctly recounts the events leading up to and surrounding the famous 1972 chess match that (briefly) wrested the world championship away from the Soviets. The story was compelling then as a surrogate battle of the Cold War. Now, however, it fascinates because of the incredible and tragic story of the American champion who was made famous by and ultimately consumed by the game of chess.

The authors do a great job of telling the story, giving just enough history of the game of chess and biography of the participants to set the stage. A particularly surprising revelation is what a sympathetic character Soviet champion Boris Spassky actualy was. A poltical maveric (at least by contemporary standards) Spassky comes off as a decent guy, especially when compared to the notoriously unstable and anti-Semitic Fisher.

The book climaxes with aa compelling description of the match itself, which would have been memorable even without the geopolitical implications. The authors wind down by revealing what became of the principle players in the drama, including the sad and notoriouslt paranoid state into which Fisher has descended.

Overall, this is a fascinating book that will delight the chess enthusiest as well as anyone else who likes a great story.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: As an enthusiastic but less-than-expert chess player, I was grateful to Eidinow and Edmonds for a book that is serious about chess at the same time that it is both accessible and engrossing. Similarly, I admired the way that they treated the cold war resonances that for many make this "the match of all time," exploring its impact without letting it obscure the real, human drama that they lay before us. A great book-- as enlightening as it is entertaining.

Rating:
Summary: Who Says Chess is Boring?
Review: Authors David Edmonds and John Eidinow, responsible for the best-selling "Wittgenstein's Poker," have now turned to the surprisingly gripping 1972 World Championship chess match between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer in their new book, "Bobby Fischer Goes to War."

As someone who is old enough to remember the match (and who watched Shelby Lyman's engagingly dorky commentary about the matches on Channel 13), I thought I knew the outline of this story fairly well. But Edmonds and Eidinow have come up with plenty of new details about what happened in the Icelandic city of Reykjavik that Summer, and the result is a book that, oddly enough, will keep you on the edge of your seat wondering how a chess match is going to turn out. Or, given Bobby Fischer's legendary eccentricities, whether the match is going to happen at all.

The book is not free from flaws. Perhaps out of a desire not to alienate the non-chess playing reader, the commentary on the individual games seldom rises above the perfunctory: in fact, they don't bother to print the moves of any given game in their entirety, not even in an appendix, which strikes me as extremely misguided.

Also, the book has a few conspicuous errors of fact. On page 175 the authors mention Henry Kissinger taking Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and his wife to Hollywood "to mingle with the stars." The next sentence begins, "There is no record of them meeting the Marx Brothers..." which would have been a trifle unlikely, since both Harpo and Chico were both long dead by 1972. On page 228 they claim that the Metropolitan Museum is "just up the road from the UN..." which they would never have written had they ever actually walked from one building to the other, since they're more than three miles apart (and halfway across town from each other).

But the heart of this book is Bobby Fischer, the brilliant but wildly unstable genius who was the most gifted (and easily the most troubled) chess player of the last century. This story is, as the authors admit towards the end, a tragedy: a perfect example of the saying "Be careful what you wish for: you might get it." Fischer had trained almost all his life with a monomaniacal passion to be the World Chess Champion, although on more than one occasion putting self-destructive obstacles in his own way, as if he was afraid of achieving what everyone said he was destined for, and when he finally achieved his lifelong ambition, he promptly fell apart mentally, to the point where today he is a fugitive from American justice, giving insane interviews to whoever will listen to him spewing out vicious anti-Semitic and anti-American propaganda.

The final part of the story, Fischer's descent into seeming madness, is a little skimped by the authors, and really deserves a book of its own (although it would be decidedly depressing reading). But with all its flaws, this is a fascinating book about a moment in history that anyone, chess player or non-chess player, can find interesting. And if it intrigues you enough to inspire you to pick up a chess set and start playing, so much the better.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating story about a chess genius
Review: David Edmonds is and John Eidinow was with the BBC; both are award-winning journalists. Their previous work, Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers (2001) was a national bestseller.
Edmonds and Eidinow have now published a second work that chronicles a confrontation between two antagonists: the celebrated "Cold War struggle" between the Russian world chess champion and a brilliant American challenger.
Reykjavik, Iceland. July 11, 1972. At precisely 5 p.m., Lothar Schmidt, a German grandmaster and chief arbiter (referee) starts the clock for "The Chess Match of the Century."
Boris Spassky, 35, the champion, awaits the arrival of Bobby Fischer, 29, the "bad boy" of chess. Six minutes after the scheduled start of the first game, Bobby charges in like a bull in a china shop.
Spassky was born in Leningrad in 1937, during "The Great Terror," Stalin's liquidation of a wholly fantastic conspiracy against the Soviet state. Educated and cultured, Spassky was in all respects a gentleman and at the top of the chess world. He sincerely believed he would defeat the arrogant American.
Fischer, born in Chicago in 1943, grew up in Brooklyn. At age six he obtained his first chess set, thus beginning his obsessive-compulsive immersion in "the Royal Game." He would become of the greatest chess players of all time, ranking with grandmasters such as Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine.
Like his chess hero, Paul Morphy (1837-1884) of New Orleans, Fischer was like a predatory beast on the prowl, going for the jugular in blitzkrieg-like attacks. One hopes, by the way, that Fischer's end is more felicitous than Morphy's, a chess genius who was found dead in a bathtub, surrounded by women's shoes.
Spitting out vituperations against communism, Fischer was determined to break the Soviet hegemony. (The Soviets had held the world championship since World War II.)
In Moscow, the KGB analyzed Fischer's eccentric behavior and concluded that he was a psychopath, a person for whom the norm was a conflict situation. Actually, say Edmonds and Eidinow, chess was Fischer's neurosis, a crutch that prevented him from stumbling into psychosis.
"In the media," write the authors, "Fischer was routinely portrayed with a range of derogatory adjectives. He was insolent, arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoiled, self-centered, abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, disrespectful, boastful, cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive, and monomaniacal." Picky! Picky! Picky! After all, Fischer was indeed, as the match soon proved, the best chess player in the world.
Fischer defeated Spassky by a score of 12 1/2 to 8 1/2. There were 11 draws (a draw counts as a half point for each player). Spassky won only three games (and one of these was a gift, because a disgrunted Fischer failed to show up for Game #2, thus causing a forfeit). Fischer won seven games.
The most intriguing information in this book is the startling revelation of a long-buried secret at the heart of the Fischer family. The FBI closely monitored Regina Fischer (Bobby's mother), amassing a nine-hundred page file on her.
Now declassified, these FBI files reveal that Gerhardt Fischer was not Bobby's biological father. Apparently, Bobby was conceived when Regina Fischer traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to visit a "close friend," the Hungarian-born physicist, Dr. Paul Felix Nemenyi, who is described in the FBI files "as having a large nose, large knobby fingers, and an awkward, slovenly walk and dress."
"For several years," write the authors, "[Fisher] lived in the bosom of the Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena. ... [However] In 1977 Fisher broke with the church, accusing it of being 'satanic.' ... From this point on, the subject of so much chess acclaim became a near total recluse,"
At the point, things really get bizarre. "Fischer descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes, and conspiracy theories. . . . He became fixated on the study of anti-Semitic tracts, such as the Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf." He railed against the Jews, calling them foul names unprintable in a family newspaper.
"Given Bobby's anti-Semitic and anticommunist obsessions," write the authors, "there is a poignant irony to the fact that his parents were communist sympathizers and that he is ethnically Jewish on both sides of his true parentage."
A glaring weakness of this book is the absence of the chess moves of the match's twenty games. Not to worry! Bobby Fischer Goes to War should appeal not only to chess buffs, but to anyone interested in a fascinating story that is well told.
Roy E. Perry of Nolensville is an advertising copywriter at a Nashville Publishing House. His e-mail address is [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: All the Levels of Gamesmanship
Review: For a brief time in 1972, chess was the only game in the world. Bobby Fischer came face to face with Boris Spassky in Iceland, and the world took delight in a simple morality play. Fischer was depicted as the lone American hero gunning to win the title from the Soviets who had held it for decades. The Cold War was reduced to the free world's champion versus the apparatchiks spawned by the Soviet socialist chess machine. It was fun to watch the battle in such black and white terms, but in _Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time_ (Ecco), David Edmonds and John Eidinow show that the true story was much more complicated although just as exciting. For instance, Spassky may have been a Russian patriot, but he was not a Soviet patriot and he was not a member of the Communist Party. Fischer was eccentric and asocial, and his bratty behavior seemed un-American to many of his fellow Americans. But both their governments had a stake in the match, and people all over the world who knew nothing about chess watched the contest carefully, and many took up the game. It was quite truly the most extraordinary chess match of all time, just as the book's subtitle says, and the book makes clear in how many ways it was extraordinary.

Spassky loved the game for itself, and, as a well-rounded gentleman who liked fishing and festive parties with his friends, seemed sincerely to be looking forward to what he called "a feast of chess," win or lose. He admired Fischer, but the book shows that beyond a colossal talent for chess, Fischer possessed few admirable qualities. He was a morose man who one journalist said "was likely to greet even an old friend as if he were expecting a subpoena". His frequent tantrums (which earned him much derision from his compatriots) did, at least, stop when he sat down to play, and he never attempted to disturb an opponent across the table. He was called by Dr. Henry Kissinger when he did not show up for the match, assured that he was "our man up against the commies." Having lost the first game, he didn't even show up for the second, and thus lost it as well. But then he crushed Spassky in the third, and went on to a match full of hard-fought draws and wins, many of which are regarded as among the finest games ever played. President Nixon sent congratulations. Spassky eventually went into contented retirement in France, continuing to regard the Soviet chess administration with disdain. Fischer never defended his title, although he has played some exposition games. He went on to join a fundamentalist Christian church, then to denounce it as satanic. He may have been the American hope during the match, but he is now deeply anti-American, spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (ironic, given his parentage on both sides, revealed here) to any radio station that will allow him voice.

The authors have interviewed all the important officials involved who are still alive, especially Spassky; they didn't interview Fischer, and don't say why, but that was probably just not possible. _Bobby Fischer Goes to War_ is not a book for those who want to study the chess games. It has exactly one board diagram, and the games are described generally, not play by play. Chess players interested in this aspect of the match already have bought better books on the games themselves. This is a book about personalities, about the history of the times, and about the off-board gambits and counter-gambits, and you certainly don't have to know any details about chess to enjoy it. There is, to be sure, a great deal to enjoy here, in the re-creation of the match and the geopolitics of the time that lent it importance.

Rating:
Summary: A Man Who Knows
Review: Good. Accessible to even those who have never touched a chess piece in their life. A fascinating look at one of the most complex people of the twentieth century. A must read for the psycologist, the chess player, and anyone else who appreciastes a good book.

Rating:
Summary: It is a good book...
Review: I am not going to take a long time and provide quotes out of the book as some reviewers have.

First , if you want a chess book about chess analysis, skip this book. It essentially has no chess analysis. If you want to re-live the summer of 1972 when Fischer stunned the world by beating Spasski, this book is for you. I was 16 in 1972 and was aware of the match, all games back then were printed in the local newspaper. Unless you lived it, it's hard to explain the excitement this match created in the US. Perhaps the closest comparison is US Gold winning hockey team in 1980. In both cases, we were going against the "bad guys" (not really "bad guys" - but there was great fear in the US about Russians back then and the press always played these US vs. USSR confrontations to the max. A victory for us, was a victory for democracy, a victory for them was a victory for communism. Communism was viewed as much greater threat back to our national security interests. The "falling domino" theory was why we went to war in Vietnam.

Anyway, I picked up book and could not put it down. I thought it was well written it covered a lot of ground regarding the match, Fischer and Spasski. If you read this book in conjunction with the "Fischer vs. Russians" book, which has the Soviet perspective, you will have great insight in to the times and the paranoia (existing on both sides) of the match. The "Fischer vs. Russians" book also had some real chess analysis of the match which I suggest reading first before this book. Another excellent book on this match is "Fischer vs. Spassky; World Chess Championship match, 1972" by Svetozar Gligoric.

As an aside, in my opinion, Mr. Gligoric is the best writer that ever played chess at high level. I highly recommend all his books.

Rating:
Summary: Reads Like a Cold War Thriller
Review: I am not what you would call a chess enthusiast. Although I can play the game, I do not do so often. What I do enjoy, however, are good tales about the Cold War. It was on that basis that I purchased this book. It is also on that basis that the book succeeds very, very well.

There are three themes that I thought were well illuminated by this book. First was Bobby Fischer's behavior. Of course I had heard that he was eccentric and difficult, but never did I imagine just how bizarre he really could be. His unbelievable micromanagement of every aspect of a tournament, his antisocial behavior, his forfeiting of a game in the world championship, all these are brought to life in a way that provides the reader a real taste for the character of the man that was wonderful, if frustrating, to read.

Second, the book did an excellent job of detailing exactly how beneficial Fischer, and the Fischer/Spassky match, was to chess overall. Bizarre behavior or not, Fischer took chess from a poor man's game to one in which top players could demand top dollar. This was far more interesting than most people would probably imagine and more interesting than I can convey with a simple review.

Third, and most fascinating, was the description of the Cold War chess match that was being played by the US and USSR on the world stage over the Fischer/Spassky match itself. Think about it - the Soviets not only dominated chess but explicitly stated that their chess superiority was evidence of the superiority of their socialist system. Then, not only are the Soviets knocked off their perch, they are utterly demolished. Even worse (from the Soviet perspective), the person doing the demolishing is not only an American, but one who is extremely arrogant, openly states that he will crush anyone the Soviets put up against him, and whose behavior is so odd and obnoxious that he would have been thrown in the Gulag if the nationalities were reversed. You could almost feel the Soviets squirm!

I must admit that I did feel bad for poor Boris Spassky, a good man representing a bad system which used him for propaganda purposes. Alas, such is history, and this book serves a very delicious slice of it.

Rating:
Summary: Ended up not liking Bobby Fischer
Review: I did enjoy reading this book, and would recommend it to anyone interested in either chess or history (particularly Cold War American-Soviet relations). One problem I have with the book is that there wasn't enough detail in the descriptions of the games themselves. I know detailed anaysis of chess moves or strategy could slow the book down (to non-chess lovers), but the competition between these two men are at the heart of the text.
The real problem may be that the authors sell the book as "Bobby Fischer" going to war, but we are unable to get any insight into Fischer's motivations or true feelings because of his insane behavior. I use the word insane intentionally.
As I stated before, read this book. You will enjoy it because it is well written and entertaining. I just wanted a little more chess.

Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable. Da Vinci Code and Manchurian Candidate in one.
Review: I didn't buy the book because there is no chess game in it. I got one from a local library. The main and background stories are interesting. There were too much and too good details that made me suspicious. The progress from newborn Fischer to his trouble time in Japan are all in there. About half of the book is about the confrontation of the '72 championship match. Except the first chapter I read fully, I only scanned quickly to the part there was chess or interesting details. Then to the page 306 (5 pages before the end!), author dropped the bomb. Fischer's biological father was not his mom's ex-husband. All I knew about Fischer before were: he had a mom and a sister (who taught him chess), and his mom was a nurse and had more other skills. Here the author slightly mentioned that FBI having some investigation on Fischer's mom and suspecting her as Soviet agent! Wow, that's chess version of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (I haven't read his book, but watched the DVD version and some documentation on History Channel.)
Then the author provided an Appendix, which gave the more detail about Fischer's parents plus a photocopy of FBI document. The government suspected there was some secretive plan that was why his mom kept pursuing for Fischer to become the world champion. Now, that's The Manchurian Candidate. They could not account for all her time (and his father's) during their stay in Moscow and other countries.
I don't know how much to believe, but the review title expresses how I feel.
Besides the 'exotic' details, I think the chess part is good. Because there is no chess game, I am willing to settle with a used book with 1/5 of the cover price.