King’s Gambit

King’s Gambit
Paul Hoffman
Hyperion
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0097-5
Non-Fiction, Memoir, Chess Lit
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

“I understood that the game (chess) was not an innocent recreation but rather a unique amalgam of art, science, and blood sport.” Writes Paul Hoffman, a former editor in chief for Discover Magazine, a former executive with the Walt Disney Company, publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica, and author of the books, Wings of Madness, The Man who Loved Only Numbers, Archimedes’ Revenge and his latest book, King’s Gambit: a Son, a Father, and the World’s Most Dangerous Game.
Hoffman, an expert in chess has rating of 1915 which puts him in the top “95% of all U.S. competitors.” He had learned how to move chess pieces around the board, by the time he was five years old. Taught by his father, “A James Joyce devotee who wrote celebrity profiles under female pseudonyms for movie magazines...He was also a poker player, a billiards and Ping-Pong hustler, a three-card monte shrill, and erudite part-time literature professor at the New School for Social Research, whose specialty was... the grotesque and perverse in twentieth-century American and Anglo-Irish fiction. Although Hoffman enjoyed chess as youth, he became obsessive with the game when he realized his parent’s relationship was in jeopardy. He writes, ...chess offered a tidy black-and-white sanctuary from the turmoil in the rest of my life.”
Hoffman has written a personally revealing book not only about his relationship with the game of chess and its aficionados, but also a book that exposes the raw nerves of his sad, estranged and tormented relationship with his father. King’s Gambit is part autobiography, part philosophical treatise, part chess documentary.
His down to earth matter-of-fact and aw-shucks self-deprecation combines with his witty intelligence to create a poetical writing style that decodes the arcane dance of the chess game into an easily understood language for the layman. An enthusiasm for the game leaks from his words and lends a juicy excitement that the reader can ingest. His description of a grand chess master playing chess against multiple players and beating them badly in only a few moves is as intense if not more so than any play-by-play commentary of a football, basketball or baseball game.