Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...very much like the closing stage of a chess game. Checkmate seemed inevitable, but no one was sure when or how it would come. Since D-day (June 5, 1944), W.W. II had turned around entirely. For six weeks the outnumbered Germans had been losing the war across France and Belgium faster than the Allied armies, running short of fuel, could win it. Lieut. General George Patton in the south lay only 100 miles from the Rhine and, like Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in the north, he was convinced that he could reach Berlin in a matter of weeks...
...Magdalen), the Best Flavor of Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream (Mandarin Chocolate). Such judgments are ideal for those who would rather sample the wine label than the wine. But even these insecure customers can find little solace in The Best. Many of its items are mere common sense (the Best Chess Player Other Than Bobby Fischer: Boris Spassky). Many more are only clothbound Consumer Reports (the Best Camera Under $100: the Japanese Olympus 355P...
...Chess," as George Steiner indicates in this little antidote to Reykjavik's hyperbolic summer of '72, "may well be the deepest, least exhaustible of pastimes, but it is nothing more. Bobby Fischer's assertion that it is 'everything' is merely necessary monomania. As for the maniac: "A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality...
...sure, Steiner admits, Bobby inoculated the world with chess fever singlehanded. Piling demands upon tantrums, he elevated the first prize from $3,000 to $2 million and transformed a board game into a blood sport. But Steiner, a literary critic first and a chess patzer second, is appalled by Fischer's xenophobic rancor, his avarice and below all, his literary taste (Fu Manchu, Tarzan and Playboy...
...proper way to re-create that intensity on the board; despite the book's schematics, the actual play at Reykjavik was not the stuff of legend. It is the text that manages to capture the historic and psychological undercurrents that made everyone believe for a moment that chess was indeed "everything." Steiner calls his own chess prowess "risible." His book, however, is deadly serious. The men he moves are real...