5/4/11
A Social Problem
I feel like such a nag but someone ought to be able to point
out a 300 lb gorilla in the room when it knuckle walks, glowers and pounds the
walls. I will be that very nag and shortly name the ape accordingly.
***
Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from
America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness by Frank Brady. Crown, 416
pages, $25.99.
It was already obvious when he was a very young boy that he
suffered from a "social problem". He "couldn’t relate to other
children" — to the tune, for example, of getting kicked out of
kindergarten. His biographer, as is his wont, puts the matter more softly,
writing that Regina, the boy's mother, "was compelled to withdraw
him". He adds that the kid "invariably separated himself from other
children [and that] by the time he reached the fourth grade, he'd been in and
out of six schools—almost two a year—leaving each time because he couldn't
abide his teachers, classmates, or even the school's location."
