Michael
Weinreb
The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who
Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team
Gotham, March 1, 2007, Hardcover, 304 pages, $26.
In this thrilling, vigorously reported, deeply empathic book, Michael Weinreb,
who has contributed articles about sports to The New York Times and Newsday,
brings to vivid life a contemporary chess world suffused with its own updated
version of nerd machismo, now wearing sweat pants and basketball sneakers and
MP3 earbuds. It’s a world over which the insuperably arrogant boy-ideal
of Bobby Fischer still hovers — only now there are girls.
The author has a gift for getting into the skin of his characters – moving
in with them, in effect – and making them completely sympathetic. [Take]
huge, monosyllabic, hip-hop-attired freshman Shawn Martinez. “Because
of the way he looks, because of his sleepy visage and his slow drawl and the
extra weight he carries, people have never taken Shawn to be much of an intellectual
threat,” Weinreb says. “That’s why chess matters to him as
much as anything else in his life.” It’s also why Martinez is frequently
able to outhustle opponents in his specialty, blitz – lightning-fast chess,
usually played for money.