Fred Waitzkin was smitten by chess during the historic Fischer-Spassky championship in 1972. When Fischer disappeared from public view, Waitzkin’s interest waned—until his own son Josh emerged as a chess prodigy.
Searching for Bobby Fischer is the story of Fred Waitzkin and his son, from the moment six-year-old Josh first sits down at a chessboard until he competes for the national championship. Drawn into the insular, international network of chess, they must also navigate the difficult waters of their own relationship. All the while, Waitzkin searches for the elusive Bobby Fischer, whose myth still dominates the chess world and profoundly affects Waitzkin’s dreams for his son.
The bestselling true story of how the author discovered his toddler was a chess prodigy and how the tyke developed until he came to win a national championship forms the superstructure for a rumination on the world of chess. While the hit film version focused on the son, the original concerns neither the boy nor the game, but on the filtering of both through author's self-preoccupation (of which Waitzkin pere seems little aware). The surface benignity covers disturbing undercurrents. Nowhere, for instance, do we find any hint of parental love. In this superb audio version, narrator Lloyd James neither narrates nor reads. Instead, he just talks, reminisces, pontificates, explains, thinks out loud. It's as if he were bending the ear of a bartender or therapist--rehashing the subject he has held forth upon too many times in the past and will do so again too many times in the future. In short, he so fully inhabits the first-person narrative that he turns the book into a disturbing and fascinating character study. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine
AudioFile...
“Superb….narrator Lloyd James…so fully inhabits the first-person narrative that he turns the book into a disturbing and fascinating character study.”
About the Author
Fred Waitzkin was born in Massachusetts in 1943 and graduated from Kenyon College. He has written for Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Motorboating and Sailing. He lives in New York City and Martha’s Vineyard and fishes regularly in the Bahamas.
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