SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER

The bestselling true story of how the author discovered his toddler was a chess prodigy and how the tyke developed until he came to win a national championship forms the superstructure for a rumination on the world of chess. While the hit film version focused on the son, the original concerns neither the boy nor the game, but on the filtering of both through author's self-preoccupation (of which Waitzkin pere seems little aware). The surface benignity covers disturbing undercurrents. Nowhere, for instance, do we find any hint of parental love. In this superb audio version, narrator Lloyd James neither narrates nor reads. Instead, he just talks, reminisces, pontificates, explains, thinks out loud. It's as if he were bending the ear of a bartender or therapist--rehashing the subject he has held forth upon too many times in the past and will do so again too many times in the future. In short, he so fully inhabits the first-person narrative that he turns the book into a disturbing and fascinating character study. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/ JAN 02]