Searching for Bobby Fischer

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

September 1, 1988
Ever since he started playing tournament chess at age seven, Josh Waitzkin, an athletic, fun-loving, not overly studious boy, has been among the top-rated players of his age group in the U.S. He is now 11. The troubled relationship between son and father, a talented but amateur chess buff, torn between ambitions for the prodigy and guilt at exploiting him, develops here against a background of chess clubs, seedy game parlors and Washington Square populated by a colorful gallery of Manhattan chess loversmasters, hustlers, Russian emigre teachers and doting parents. In marked contrast, notes the author, is the hero status of chess champions in Russia and the palatial setting of competitions like the Moscow Hall of Columns where he and his son attended the 1984 Karpov-Kasparov matches, which may have been not only state-supported but politically controlled, he contends. What, the author wonders, will become of Fischer's legacy of a promising generation of young American players following their idol's premature retirement from chess and society? First serial to the New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; author tour.