As originally posted by RookHouse.

com, and also by the BobbyFischerBlogspot, both in 2011: WRITING BOBBY FISCHER Is it not curious that reviewers of Frank Brady's Endgame: Bobby Fischer... (Crown 2011), including Dylan Loeb McClain (NY Times Book Review, Feb. 13), fail to comment on one of the book's obvious strengths: its writing? This oversight is especially curious at a time when media and educators everywhere are calling attention to declining skills in composition. It is the propulsion of the book's writing, owing to the narrative's pace, tension, and Brady's reconstructions of Fischer's moods and thoughts, that keeps the reader engaged. An experienced writer in the biography genre (Orson Welles, Barbra Streisand, Aristotle Onassis), Frank Brady faced two serious challenges in his new book on Fischer: updating his previous portrait Profile of a Prodigy (McKay 1965; revised, Dover 1989) with newly found and newly disclosed facts; and then enhancing the overall presentation of his (total) material with a more crafted literary style. Brady's original treatment of Fischer was understandably journalistic, even spare in its rendering of certain details of the prodigy's habits, community, and inner turmoil; but in 2011, Brady (with capable editors at Crown) had a clear compositional advantage of bringing to his familiar subject an attractive overlay of effective writerly devices, most obviously the rhetorical question and literary allusion (Fischer is Kafka in a mad world; Fischer is an Icelandic hero from the sagas of yore, etc.). For example, presenting readers with an early success of Fischer's, at the Interzonal match in Yugoslavia, namely young Bobby's draw against David Bronstein of the Soviet Union, one of the strongest chess masters ever, Brady deploys several good tactics: "... there was near-delirium when word arrived [at the Marshall Chess Club, New York City] of the draw. 'Bronstein?!' people were saying incredulously, almost whooping, as if the Soviet were Goliath, and Bobby as David has stood up to him piece for piece, pawn for pawn. 'Bronstein?! The genius of modern chess?' The impossible had occurred: A fifteen-year-old had managed to draw against perhaps the second or third strongest player in the world....Could this precocious Brooklyn boy not just become a Candidate but possibly win the tournament? Was American chess about to soar on the wings of Bobby's fame? 'Bronstein!' (p. 102). Thus wrote Brady, in high feather. Contributed by: Maureen E. Mulvihill Brooklyn, NY. 2011. ________________