Word: chess
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...Oklahoma wildcat oil prospector, Gardner learned early to separate wild claims from bedrock actualities. At the University of Chicago, he was known as a demon chess player who quit the game for a greater love: philosophy. "But somewhere, no matter how serious I was," he recalls, "there was always a little boy kicking around inside. Then I sold my first story to Esquire. It wrapped a plot around some shaggy dog stories. Red Skelton mentioned the piece on the air, and the boy and philosopher were off and running...
...ruling elite. Yet by the time he died last week at age 79 after a long illness, Nikolai Alexandrovich Bulganin had become an unperson in his homeland, an ignored and forgotten figure who in his last years idled away his time strolling along Moscow's boulevards and watching chess games in the park. Izvestia devoted only a paragraph to his obituary and no officials attended the perfunctory 30-minute funeral service...
...Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive -for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space...
...text, Saidy has provided some moving excerpts from his diary of a fumbled tournament that cost him a grand master's rating. Lessing has wittily recalled a misspent youth in one of Manhattan's less salubrious chess-and coffeehouses. The authors have also taken care to make the historical sections pert and amusing. "Can you forgive me this indiscretion?" Benjamin Franklin writes to a wealthy Frenchwoman. "Never hereafter shall I consent to begin a game [of chess] in your bathroom...
Senior Master Edmar Mednis' How to Beat Bobby Fischer is a detailed anatomical study of an Achilles' heel. The Achilles is Fischer, the winningest chess master in history; of the 576 games he has played since he became U.S. champion at the incredible age of 14, he has won 327 and drawn 188. But even Fischer occasionally loses; in the past 16 years he has booted 61 games. To whom? At what age? Was he playing white or black? Did he blunder? Was he outgeneraled? Do any patterns of weakness appear? In the most intriguing chess manual...