He is one of three or four reasonable candidates for the title of greatest chess player who ever lived. The standard biography is repeated: the early childhood in New York chess clubs, winning the US championship at 14, missing out on one world championship cycle through a fit of pique, and then finally bulldozing his way to the match against Spassky by crushing three of the top players in the world.įischer's run of 20 straight victories against top opposition at that time still stands as an unparalleled display of dominance. The one interviewee notably absent, however, is Fischer himself. His own recollections about his chess-playing career in the USSR, how victory afforded his family a "palatial" two-room apartment but defeat meant he was banned from playing abroad for two years, constitute some of the best parts of the book. Far from being an obedient Soviet puppet, for example, the brilliant Spassky was a semi-dissident playboy. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, and their impressive team of researchers, have combed Soviet records and American intelligence files, and interviewed nearly every surviving actor in the drama, to give a more nuanced account of a match that was characterised by extreme mutual paranoia. " meticulously researched work.The definitive account of this historic struggle.'Bobby Fischer Goes to War' is an outstanding piece of journalism, which captures this unique sporting moment more accurately and vividly than before.At least, that's how the story usually goes. Grandmaster Nigel Short, London Daily Mail: conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard." "A page-turner for grandmasters and neophytes alike" * Chess as metaphor for character and strategy - a short tour through cinema's archives * Q & A with David Edmonds and John Eidinow * Why we wrote 'Bobby Fischer Goes to War' of 16 pages with insights, interviews and more:
A mesmerizing narrative of brilliance and triumph, hubris and despair, Bobby Fischer Goes to War is a biting deconstruction of the Bobby Fischer myth, a nuanced study on the art of brinkmanship, and a revelatory cold war tragicomedy. Thirty years later, David Edmonds and John Eidinow have set out to reexamine the story we recollect as the quintessential cold war clash between a lone American star and the Soviet chess machine. Their showdown, played against the backdrop of superpower politics, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, and farce to rival a Marx Brothers film. In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, the Soviet world chess champion, Boris Spassky,and his American challenger, Bobby Fischer, met in Reykjavik, Iceland, for the most notorious chess match of all time.
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