Book Review: Bobby Fischer and His World by John Donaldson

Chess Americana

If you want to understand America’s relationship to chess, you have to understand Bobby Fischer.

Bobby Fischer won the title in 1972, and inspired a generation of chess players born in the 50s, 60s and 70s, including the author of Bobby Fischer and His World, International Master John Donaldson. Fischer is probably the most biographied player to ever exist, and Donaldson has instead written to fill in between those oft-tread lines, giving new details and primary source material accounts surrounding the enigmatic American giant. This gives the book a bit of an anthological feel. If there’s a particular narrative, Donaldson is content to let it come out naturally and allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. To put it in GM Jesse Kraii’s words, this is more of a hagiography (in the best possible definition of the term). It doesn’t connect the dots — it’s about the space between. It may be hard to follow along unless you first have a rough timeline of Bobby’s exploits which have been covered in other books.

Fischer’s behavior at the board was typically unimpeachable, but this does not hold true to his life apart from the game, which was filled with many warts (most notably, his well-documented antisemitism). John doesn’t avoid these, but takes Fischer at his word and at face-value. The book is littered with photos of every who’s who from this incredible Cold War era of the game, excerpts from old magazine and newspaper articles — anything that hadn’t yet been covered or discovered — all relics of an era that we wish to reminisce from afar. Bobby Fischer is the main character, but the surrounding ensemble gets many spotlight moments. From Botvinnik to William Lombardy, from Petrosian to Tal, from Larsen to Spassky, from Lou Hays to Patti Smith (whose words Donaldson leaves as a beautiful finale); Fischer touched a lot of lives, known and unknown, west and east.

There are 99 annotated games (as you can see on the cover), but you don’t have to play through them to understand the entire narrative. They are mostly scores of Fischer’s games, but there are other players too. Annotations are often Donaldson’s but he cites many sources in order to give more context. This is anything but a Best Games collection.

This was a leisure read for me, and the book doesn’t contain improvement advice, so I won’t leave a rating on my blog — it’s not a must-read for people who want to get better. But I did find Fischer’s attitude toward the game to be extremely inspiring. One man was able to challenge an entire worldview’s grip on an intellectual pastime and walked away with the title to prove his worth, overcoming childhood poverty and dealing with increasing mental illness in order to make his way to the top of the mountain. Beside that, Fischer’s style (if such there is) is inimitable and this means his games are always a joy to play through. Even as he’s accusing Kasparov and Karpov of arranging world championship title match results, his keen analytical eye was shown to still have 20/20 vision. It was honestly incredible to see these little tidbits that Donaldson was able to dig up.

When Fischer died, he left an uneven legacy. It’s unavoidable that while we can take away lessons from the board, and even his own attitude and motivations at the game, we are also left with a very cautionary tale. Facing that head-on (as the author himself does) is important if we want to create a new and better legacy that can replace the last one. But there are a lot of thanks to give to Fischer for making American chess possible in ways that it wasn’t before. Chess culture in America retains the indelible mark he left. We still carry some of his ghost. To really understand America’s relationship to chess you have to know about Bobby Fischer. He’s gone in body and spirit, but not in our consciousness.

So thank you John for this collection, and thank you Bobby.