Book Review: Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

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Book Review: Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

Reader Rating: 9/10

Salaams! Just finished up an incredibly interesting book focusing on the Chess World Championship held in the summer of 1972 in Reykjavik, Iceland, between the Russian world champion Boris Spassky and the American challenger Bobby Fischer--in what has become known as the "most extraordinary chess match of all time." What a match! What shenanigans! What twists & turns! What intensity! What moves & mistakes under pressure! This tournament, taking place over almost two months, kept the world's attention transfixed over that summer.

This match came to be viewed as an extension of the Cold War between the West & the Soviets: a face-to-face battle between two real people who were proxies for their countries and their radically different political systems. Neither of these chess players were actually good representatives of their own political systems; Spassky was very much a free-spirited, privileged, and self-opinionated Soviet, and Fischer was anything but a true patriotic "true blue-rah-rah" American.

Another reason the match captivated the world's attention was that, with the exception of a two year world champion stint by a Dutchman, the world championship of chess had been in the hands of a Russian or Soviet (Armenian, Lithuanian, Georgian) consistently since 1927. The Soviets saw their domination of world chess as a demonstration of their system's ideological superiority. The weakness of the western mind and its capitalistic system was displayed in their weakness at the mentally-challenging & taxing, logical game of chess, Soviet propaganda proudly proclaimed. That was about to change, though, as a rather rude and crude, uneducated and uncultured New Yorker named Bobby Fischer (finally) sat down at the chess table in Iceland across from Boris Spassky.

The first move of the match was almost never made. The book details the innumerable starts and fits, twists and turns that the chess organizers, teams, and audiences were forced to undergo throughout the tournament due to Fischer's unrelenting demands and commands. The brilliant Fischer was rather like a petulant child and mad scientist all rolled into one; his demands were outrageous and often trivial, but due to his worldwide audience draw, he usually got his way--probably one too many times. Spassky was keen to play against Fischer and so mostly gave it to his demands for the sake of keeping the tournament alive. The Soviet team was only glad to give in and be flexible while Spassky was ahead 2 - 0, with Fischer playing black in Game #3. But once Fischer brilliantly began pulling ahead, the Soviets began making their own outrageous accusations (so, well, Soviet-like): the champion's food and/or drinks had been tampered with, the lighting above the chess board which Fischer had specially requested was adversely affecting Spassky, the U.S. team, Fischer's specially-requested chair was beaming X-Rays at Spassky to confuse his mind, etc., etc. They brought in special investigators, scientists, and psychologists to test everything, all to no avail.

In the end, it was the absolutely brilliant chess playing of the challenger Fischer that won the day and the tournament. And sadly then, with Fischer's final victory of the long sought-after title of world champion, came his ultimate demise into paranoia and reclusiveness, resulting in his never playing sanctioned, competitive chess again (he has been in Japanese police custody for the last six months--soon to be extricated to the U.S. to face criminal charges stemming from his $5 million "rematch" with Spassky in 1992 in then-prohibited Yugoslavia).

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Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time
by David Edmonds ,John Eidinow "It is five o'clock in the evening of Tuesday, 11July 1972..." ( more )

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Product Details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Ecco; 1st edition    (March, 2004)
ISBN: 0060510242
Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds. ( View shipping rates and policies )
Average Customer Review: based on 23 reviews.     ( Write a review )
Amazon.com Sales Rank in Books :#71,081
Edition: Hardcover  

Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The duo that crafted the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker returns to chronicle "the most notorious chess duel in history," the 1972 match between world champion Boris Spassky and challenger Bobby Fischer. Although the competition has achieved iconic status, Edmonds and Eidinow do an excellent job of making the story fresh, recreating the atmosphere of controversy that surrounded both players long before they met in Reykjavik, not to mention the extraordinary hurdles tournament organizers faced in getting the already eccentric Fischer to even show up, which ultimately required a phone call from Henry Kissinger and prize money put up by an English millionaire. Fischer's troubling personality is a matter of common knowledge, but the thawing of the Cold War enables the authors to flesh out the Soviet side of the story, offering a fuller perspective on the friction between the rebellious grandmaster and Communist officials, and revelations about the very active presence of the KGB during the games, while debunking other rumors about plots to poison or brainwash Spassky. (Declassified FBI files also present groundbreaking information about Fischer and his family.) The actual chess has been analyzed to death elsewhere, so the authors don't delve into the games' details much except when the players made horrendous blunders, which segue into the underlying focus on psychology, addressing Fischer's ability to get away with bullying officials into meeting his exacting demands and Spassky's loss of confidence over the course of the match. Even if you think you know the story, this highly entertaining account will surprise and delight.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description:
In the summer of 1972, with a presidential crisis stirring in the United States and the cold war at a pivotal point, two men -- the Soviet world chess champion Boris Spassky and his American challenger Bobby Fischer -- met in the most notorious chess match of all time. Their showdown in Reykjavik, Iceland, held the world spellbound for two months with reports of psychological warfare, ultimatums, political intrigue, cliffhangers, and farce to rival a Marx Brothers film.

Thirty years later, David Edmonds and John Eidinow, authors of the national bestseller Wittgenstein's Poker, 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 -- a machine that had delivered the world title to the Kremlin for decades. Drawing upon unpublished Soviet and U.S. records, the authors reconstruct the full and incredible saga, one far more poignant and layered than hitherto believed.

Against the backdrop of superpower politics, the authors recount the careers and personalities of Boris Spassky, the product of Stalin's imperium, and Bobby Fischer, a child of post-World War II America, an era of economic boom at home and communist containment abroad. The two men had nothing in common but their gift for chess, and the disparity of their outlook and values conditioned the struggle over the board.

Then there was the match itself, which produced both creative masterpieces and some of the most improbable gaffes in chess history. And finally, there was the dramatic and protracted off-the-board battle -- in corridors and foyers, in back rooms and hotel suites, in Moscow offices and in the White House.

The authors chronicle how Fischer, a manipulative, dysfunctional genius, risked all to seize control of the contest as the organizers maneuvered frantically to save it -- under the eyes of the world's press. They can now tell the inside story of Moscow's response, and the bitter tensions within the Soviet camp as the anxious and frustrated apparatchiks strove to prop up Boris Spassky, the most un-Soviet of their champions -- fun-loving, sensitive, and a free spirit. Edmonds and Eidinow follow this careering, behind-the-scenes confrontation to its climax: a clash that displayed the cultural differences between the dynamic, media-savvy representatives of the West and the baffled, impotent Soviets. Try as they might, even the KGB couldn't help.

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.

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