Word: fischer
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...chess tournament in Tunisia in 1967, Bobby Fischer, then 24, was pitted against another American grand master, Samuel Reshevsky. At game time, Fischer was nowhere to be found, so Reshevsky sat down opposite Fischer's empty chair, made his first move, punched the game clock and waited. And waited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammered Reshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned competitive chess for two years. Which raises the question, Why is the gift of genius so often given to people too stupid...
...Bobby Fischer Goes to War (Ecco; 342 pages), David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischer's most famous match, the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chess game that was not only an epic staring match between two intellectual gladiators but also the focus of all kinds of weird, free-floating cold war cultural-political energy. It was the Rumble in the Jungle and the Cuban missile crisis all rolled into...
...drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the American way, was an antisocial, anti-Semitic egomaniac who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard was made of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was Ali to Fischer's Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Goes to War tells the story in fine, brisk style, interpreting the red-hot chess-fu action--the Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense!--for us nongeniuses and conveying...
Champollion and Fischer were lucky: they were heroes in their time. Deprived of the spotlight, genius can grow up twisted and strange. David Hahn was the child of divorced, clueless parents living in a David Lynch--perfect Michigan suburb in the mid-1990s. A loner and a compulsive tinkerer, Hahn somehow got it into his head in high school to build a nuclear reactor in his mom's potting shed, and damn if he didn't come close. In The Radioactive Boy Scout (Random House; 209 pages), Ken Silverstein describes how Hahn extracted radioactive elements from household objects--americium from...
...Green Line that has demarcated the two sides since a 1949 armistice. Israel says the fence must jut into Palestinian lands to ensure security; the barrier's route near Ben Gurion International Airport, for instance, is meant to prevent attacks on departing aircraft. But German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer summed up the E.U. view in a recent interview with al-Jazeera: "Every government has the duty to defend its population against terrorism. And if a fence or a wall is needed to do this, that's a decision of the national government. However, we criticize the route. This must...