Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cabinet members, who were mostly hand-picked opportunists from minor parties. They are expected to face trial as war criminals. Their wives and other Pakistani women lived in fear, and the frequent moaning from their rooms at the Intercontinental contrasted eerily with the noisy candlelight poker and chess games of the correspondents who were not standing four-hour guard duty to keep out intruders. The hotel roof could hardly have been a better place for TV crews to grind away at air strikes. During the raids, shrapnel was occasionally fished out of the swimming pool, and a large time bomb...
With all its ingenuity and affluence, the U.S. has somehow contrived to make a mockery of that assertion of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on behalf of the elderly. Victims of a society that has prolonged life but shortened its usefulness, they sit playing chess, feeding birds or nodding in the sun in geriatric ghettos from San Diego to St. Petersburg. If less well off, they huddle in threadbare apartments in central cities, eking out a meager existence on Social Security, daring the sidewalks only when necessity overrides fear and infirmity...
Coach Marion, who likens fencing to chess in terms of strategy, almost saw his tactics backfire. Substituting liberally in the third round, he saw MIT come back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit to tie the score. He defended his strategy, asserting that "If a team can't take one bout out of six, we deserve to loss...
Guralnick takes the reader many places: in Chicago, to Muddy Waters' house, to the moribund offices of Chess and to the hospital for a visit with Howling Wolf; to Newport, 1964, for the dramatic recovery of Skip James; to backwoods Louisiana, for "a real country supper" with Robert Pete Williams; and to Memphis, for visits with Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich. Wherever possible, he lets the artist tell his own story. He wastes little time attempting to describe a musician's style, instead concentrating on tracing the man's influences. One begins to sense the intimacy of the circles...
...Going Home is suffused with a sad nostalgia which occasionally turns into bitterness. Understandably, Guralnick deplores the neglect suffered by many artists; he is dismayed, too, by the tendency of the American public to devour its most gifted children. In any case, things will never be the same. Whether Chess Records is dead--or indeed, whether the blues are dead--can be debated; but unquestionably, an era has ended...