New York Times website has a review. Amazon.com has lots of reviews already for a book not due out until Feb 1, 2011. Appears Brady was able to do a lot of research on the former World Champion, Robert J. Fischer.
Russell Miller Vancouver WA
The NY Times review is here:
nytimes.com/2011/01/24/books/24book.html
I have no doubt that the book will be an excellent read, and the review promises that this will be the case.
But I must take issue with the conclusion at the end of this statement:
Of course, Bobby Fischer had friends. I personally have known at least five people who certainly were his friends: Ed Edmondson, Lina Grumette, Larry Evans, Ron Gross, and Boris Spassky.
That Fischer severed ties with each of them at one or another point in his life does not in any way mean that they were not true to him, nor him to them, at whatever level of friendship they had. I’ve spent a lot of time with each of them, and from all I learned from them, Bobby was very much himself with them, looked out for them as friends during the periods of their friendships, and maintained no apparent fences between himself and such friends. This came through in everything they ever told me about him and their times with him.
When I finally was about to meet Bobby in 1988, Ron Gross explained to me how his anti-Semitism might manifest itself, and how to push it away and cause him to return to being his more normal self. It worked exactly as Ron said it would.
Both Ed Edmondson and Lina Grumette told me how well he treated anyone ordinary person who was a chess player. Having arrived in Pasadena, CA, in 1980, as a child of the “Fischer boom” (my first tournament was in summer of 1972, at age 14), I became a regular at the chess club in Hollywood that Lina Grumette opened to chess masters and lesser players in that era. Bobby had lived in her home years earlier, and his portrait dominated the front parlor in which we played.
It always seemed to me that we in chess made too many sweeping statements about “what Bobby should do”, and so on, and I never really thought I would ever meet him, nor that it was any kind of right of mine to seek any kind of meeting. In fact, I wondered if the incredible image of this greatest exponent and practitioner of chess from my youth might be safer if I never came into contact with the dark side of his paranoia. And yet, when through happenstance, we came into contact and spent two evenings together, it was absolutely enchanted, and I will forever treasure having once spent six uninterrupted hours looking at chess games with him.
Anyone who reads Dick Cavett’s reminiscences, who views the photographs of him with the photographer from Life, or who has known him more directly or through one of his friends, can see that deep down, among Bobby Fischer’s many facets, was a warm human being. It showed in his friendships, it showed in his principled stands, and it showed in his sometimes breathtakingly naive honesty at times, too. In analyzing the trials of his life, and whatever demons must have also afflicted his personality, this should not be lost.
Most interesting comments HAL, thanks for sharing. I wish Peter B. would write something about his time with Fischer. Maybe there is something in the Brady book which I have placed an order for.
Russell Miller Vancouver WA
Nothing new re: Peter B. in the book. But Brady interviewed Walter Browne about three times Fischer visited him in Berkeley. Bobby left after he spent fours using Browne’s phone on long distance and Walter told him to hang up.
I hope you ordered it from USCFSales and not from Amazon. 
Ordered from neither. Bob Long gets my chess book orders.
Russell Miller Vancouver WA
These days, I think it sells more books to be critical and condescending about Fischer.
I’m such a victim of Amazon one-click buyng…
It was my impression from the Times book review that Brady has written a fairly objective book. Will have to read it and find out.
It was my impression from the Times book review that Brady has written a fairly objective book. Will have to read it and find out.
In some ways Brady is protective of Fischer, for example, by discounting the validity of the Ralph Ginzburg interview.
Ralph Ginzburg the pornographer, who was sentenced to five years in prison but ultimately served only eight months.
Rather quaint by today’s standards that he served any prison time for publishing Sc**w Magazine. I have friends who used to read that and Playboy----for the interviews, of course. 
You are thinking of Alvin “Al” Goldstein.
Watch your language, Young Man!