 The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top HighSchool Chess Team Books In Print, Audio Books. |
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The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top HighSchool Chess Team
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The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Genuises Who Make Up America's Top HighSchool Chess Team Customer Reviews
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He Knows Them So Well
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Like many other guys I got into chess via the smash Broadsway musical written by Tim Rice and the two fellows from ABBA.
The musical, for those of us lucky enough to see it several times, glamorized the international world of high stakes chess championships, and posed chess as a way to resolve international Cold War tensions between grand masters of warring nations, spawning such monster hits as "One Night in Bangkok" and "I Know Him So Well." In Harold Prince's innovative direction, the stage became a living chessboard, the rooks, knights and pawns constantly alert and on the move at the drop of a baton. Now along comes Michael Weinreb, a top New York-based sportswriter, who focuses in on the Brooklyn high school that does for chess what FAME did for the performing arts.
The results? Not so glamorous, but compelling. Weinrib examines the ways in which few native-born Americans are drawn to chess, while the newly immigrant and the poor see in the sport a parallel to the nomadism of their existences, shuttled from state to state like bishops being moved two spaces one way, one space to the side. The main boys he profiles come from a wide variety of foreign countries, and once they're here, they do their best to go American, wearing baggy jeans, oversized T-shirts, FUBU underwear and the like. Their teacher, himself a chess expert, is not above employing Murrow's own strategies (Edward R. Murrow, after whom the school is named, was himself not a bad amateur chess player) to allow his boys (and one girl) a liberal amount of freedom regarding their academic commitments that would be unheard of at most schools.
As Weinrib reports, some of them fall apart, and some of them manage to keep their eye on the prize. Not since Frances Parkinson Keyes' 1960 novel THE CHESS PLAYERS, which examined the sorry, doomed life of American grand master Paul Morphy (possibly the greatest chess player who ever lived) (19th century, New Orleans), have we been shown in such detail the uncensored lives of the teens obsessed with the sport--the gateway to the kingdom.
In some way, his book will disappoint those of us who know how to play chess, for it is more about what our lives look like from the outside. But in others, it's a wake up call. I don't consider myself a geek, an oddball, or a genius, but now I know what the world thinks of men like me, men who, inspired by a dream (with music by ABBA), got into something I don't have any control of any more. Those who go to Hurrow in furture generations (like actress Marisa Tomei and director Darren Aronofsky--cited by Weinrib as two prominent graduates of Murrow's equally impressive theater program for kids) will be tempted to join the chess club just to travel the world! With their concentration on musical theater and chess, it's a wonder Murrow has not apparently put on a student production of the famous chess musical! They could star the the beloved chess graduates profiled in this book, Sal, Oscar Santana, Willy, Alex and Ilya. Hey, give it a chance! Weinrib quotes an approving chess source, who says, "The word dynasty does not completely describe Edward R. Murrow High School's pre-eminence in high school chess: complete hegemony is more accurate." |
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