***May 2011 Newsletter Pick***

In Endgame, Frank Brady gives a 21st-century update to one of the most fascinating rags-to-riches-to-rags stories in recent memory. Born into humble circumstances (he and his mother were essentially homeless for the first months of his life), Bobby Fischer brought a fearsome intelligence and obsessive focus to the chessboard, culminating in his defeat of world champion Boris Spassky in Reykjavik in 1972. This defining moment, of both Fischer's life and the Cold War, proved to be short-lived: soon afterward, he spiraled into increasingly bizarre and antisocial, and eventually outright sociopathic, behavior. Brady's book gives equal space to the unlikely conquests of Fischer's younger years and the trainwreck of his later ones, and while it draws certain inevitable comparisons between the subject's life and the game of chess, it never oversells this idea, instead letting the story stand on its own. Endgame is worthwhile for being more than a catalog of impressive achievements offset in equal parts by sordid details: ultimately, it's a book about the relationship between intelligence, sanity, and happiness, and presents the unsettling possibility that moving too far toward one of these ideals may move us irrevocably away from the other two.

***April 2010 Newsletter Pick***

This updated edition of Thirsting For Peace in a Raging Century, which won the National Book Award in 1988, is a masterpiece of expansive writing. While Edward Sanders is (rightfully) celebrated as a counterculture hero, he's much more than that - his background in the classics gives his writing some of the epic weight of Homer and Virgil, and his explorations into ancient Egyptian culture allow him to draw some striking, and surprisingly effortless, parallels between 1960 BC and 1960 AD. The poems draw from a vast stable of characters and scenes: Ginsberg, Olson, Pound, Wordsworth, Sappho, and Plato, along with Nixon, Charles Manson, angry pharaohs, drug dealers, crooked cops, poetry readings, plane rides, Egyptian death-boats, psilocybin trips, obscene trysts both real and fantasized, and nearly everything else under the sun. For an example of Sanders' range, start with "Sappho on East Seventh" - it's one of my favorite poems of all time.