The Grandmaster

September 1, 2018
A championship chess match and more, as Butler (The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba, 2015, etc.) illuminates the possibilities and limitations of commodifying a game that has been an obsession for so many for so long.For those who don't play, popular interest in chess might begin and end with Bobby Fischer, or maybe it extends to the matches of man-vs.-computer, Russia's Garry Kasparov against IBM's Deep Blue, as the former entered popular folklore as "the John Henry of chess." It likely doesn't encompass Norway's Magnus Carlsen and Russia's Sergey Karjakin, whose 2016 battle for the world championship was hailed in advance as "a coming-out party for chess"--and is the focus of this book. ESPN had somehow turned professional poker into a spectator-sport sensation, and the feeling was that chess was next, on the verge of popular attention it had rarely received since Fischer. The biggest challenge for the author was that "I'd never encountered more impenetrable people to interview than Magnus Carlsen and Sergey Karjakin, presumably the game's greatest ambassadors. I'd been given the impression I'd have had an easier time arranging an audience with Pope Francis." Though the tension of a game may be exquisite, even excruciating, for those who know what they are watching, there's only so much you can write to describe the interminable intervals between moves. So Butler writes all around his primary subject, going beyond the championship and the two competitors to investigate spectators, journalists, other prodigies and the fates they'd met, those who knew Fischer, and other aspects of the interrelationship between chess and New York, where the championship was held, and other events that were transpiring then and there, most significantly the coronation of Donald Trump. It's a bravura performance by the author, who recognizes that if more people cared about that championship, this would have been a very different book.An entertaining book that contains everything you never imagined you wanted to know about chess.

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Centering on the November 2016 World Chess Championship in New York and its finalists, Sergey Karjakin and Magnus Carlsen, this work by journalist Butler (The Domino Diaries) presents a readable examination of chess culture and history as well as a blow-by-blow account of the toll of winning a championship chess match. The driving question is who really has control, the game or the player? Spectators also wondered if Norway's Magnus Carlsen, who started playing chess at age five and reached grandmaster status at 13, might succumb to the downfall that has consumed legends of the game, such as Bobby Fischer. While primarily focusing on Carlsen, Butler also provides insight into the competitive play of Russia's Sergey Karjakin. Among those who watched the match include Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stanley Kubrick. In the end, Butler writes a visceral and riveting study of a game and its players at once austere, powerful, and imposing, yet simultaneously fragile and vulnerable. He perfectly captures the game's culture, as it's consumed by an ever-present valuation of worth, title, and rank. VERDICT A must for chess enthusiasts and the curious alike. A truly fascinating and beautifully rendered account.--Benjamin Malczewski, Toledo Lucas Cty. P.L.

October 1, 2018
This is not the usual chronicle of a world-championship chess match. It has no diagrams, lists of moves, or strategy analysis. Instead Butler (The Domino Diaries?, 2015) offers insight into what it takes to become the best chess player on the planet, as Magnus Carlsen did when he defended his title against challenger Sergei Karjakin in 2016. Butler was there, hoping to figure out why Carlsen, the highest-rated chess player in history, isn't as famous as Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov and what makes him the best ever. Butler offers arch descriptions of the event's spectators (a mix of scruffy, networking chess grandmasters, slickly dressed billionaires, and excited, chess-obsessed kids); shares his experiences as a street-chess hustler; and portrays great chess champions of the past, or more exactly, their record of descending into psychosis. What he finds is that the champions have in common not just phenomenal intellectual talent for chess but also a will to dominate opponents that borders on the sadistic. A vibrant and provocative look at chess and its metaphorical battle for territory and power.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)