Books: The Trouble with Genius

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At a chess tournament in Tunisia in 1967, Bobby Fischer, then 24, was pitted against another American grand master, Samuel Reshevsky. At game time, Fischer was nowhere to be found, so Reshevsky sat down opposite Fischer's empty chair, made his first move, punched the game clock and waited. And waited. With five minutes left, Fischer suddenly strode onstage and, with a series of blindingly quick moves, hammered Reshevsky into defeat. Two days later, Fischer quit the tournament and abandoned competitive chess for two years. Which raises the question, Why is the gift of genius so often given to people too stupid to know what to do with it?

In Bobby Fischer Goes to War (Ecco; 342 pages), David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischer's most famous match, the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chess game that was not only an epic staring match between two intellectual gladiators but also the focus of all kinds of weird, free-floating cold war cultural-political energy. It was the Rumble in the Jungle and the Cuban missile crisis all rolled into one.

The drama was hopelessly miscast. Fischer, the champion of the American way, was an antisocial, anti-Semitic egomaniac who complained about the lighting, the auditorium, the prize money, even the marble the chessboard was made of. Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was Ali to Fischer's Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Goes to War tells the story in fine, brisk style, interpreting the red-hot chess-fu action--the Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense!--for us nongeniuses and conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard through details plucked from FBI and KGB records. We see, for example, Soviet experts whisking Spassky's orange juice back to Moscow to test for suspicious capitalist contaminants.

It seems to be in the nature of genius to zero in on its purpose. In the 1790s a young French boy named Jean-Francois Champollion, the son of a bookseller, became obsessed with ancient languages--not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew, Arabic, Persian and Chaldean. According to The Linguist and the Emperor (Ballantine; 271 pages), by Daniel Meyerson, Champollion was a dreamy, solitary kid who mouthed off in class, but as a schoolboy, he assembled a 2,000-page dictionary of Coptic, an ancient Egyptian language. Luckily for him, French soldiers in Egypt soon discovered the Rosetta stone, a chunk of gray and pink rock with the same text written on it in both Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphics, which no one had yet deciphered. Unlocking hieroglyphics was Champollion's great work, and Meyerson tells the story as a passionate linguistic love affair. After finally solving the mystery, Champol lion collapsed in a coma for eight days.