Review: Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From Fischer's limited world of connection, this somewhat privileged view of the chess talent's bizarre and extreme arc tempers claims of madness to a more functional paranoia. The detailed book covers Fischer's entire life, and beyond to exhumation, including a more real and positive relationship with his mother than is often stated and a view into his peripatetic and hermit-like life from a cramped Pasadena room to the end of an bookstore aisle in Iceland. There is some bizarre irony, not explicitly stated here, that as he turned craven and money-grubbing he became the worst stereotype from the anti-Semitic fever-dream of the neo-nazi thinkers whose books and pamphlets he sometimes promoted to intimates and strangers.

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