The law of the conservation of energy (mine) precludes my doing a full review of a book that has already been reviewed throughout the mainstream media – so far, I've noted the NY Times, LA Times, New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor and The Independent (UK), besides a long erudite review by the new editor of Chess Life, Kalev Pehme. Moreover, the British authors are scheduled for an eight-city U.S. tour, unprecedented in the history of books about chess. Notice that I didn't say, "chess books," because there is not one game to play over, and only one position to look at, in the whole book. It is not clear at all that the authors even know how to play chess.

Like a couple of other books that appeared in the wake of the 1972 Fischer-Spassky match, this one is concerned with the strategy and tactics not of chess but of the Cold War struggle of which it was billed as a key component, and the psychology of the antagonists. The authors made their mark with a previous effort, "Wittgenstein's Poker," which elaborated an encounter of two 20th-century philosophers into an epic (Goodness, how can folks get so wrapped up in a battle of mere words, when chess pieces are available?). Now the old story is vastly enhanced by FBI files (those bozos tracked his pinko mom for decades) and revelations of the internal schemes of the potentates of the USSR.

Thanks to the writers' exhaustive research, interviewing dozens of sources from Henry Kissinger to Boris Spassky, this volume is an invaluable source of facts about the match that even this assiduous reader who summed up the match for Chess Life did not know. The story captivated the entire world for two months and inspired many a young talent to devote his life to the game. But while the authors elucidate the Soviet and Icelandic stories full well, they are weak on the American side. In particular, they never interviewed a key actor – me (They may have thought I was deceased. Why can't the IRS think that?). It was I, on the urging of Ed Edmondson, who got the ambivalent and skittish Bobby to halve his distance from Iceland, getting him from L.A. to N.Y. And in N.Y. we almost got him on a plane to Iceland, until the appearance of journalists drove him into an escape sprint and he ended up at my family home on Long Island. At last, he was persuaded to go – late. That story I'll fill out one day.

BOBBY FISCHER GOES TO WAR is a must read for chess history aficionados. There are errors in it, which I'll just mention. It leaves ambiguous whether Spassky was ordered home, and skirts the reason that Fischer was forfeited in the second game. As to the purse (pre-augmentation by British patron James Slater), the authors state that the winner's $76G is two-thirds of the total $125G – incorrect. They overstate the achievements of Lombardy, who was never U.S. Champ, and Saidy, who was never U.S. Open Champ. And Fiume (Rijeka), the birthplace of Nemenyi, now revealed almost surely to be Fischer's biological father (making this current neo-Nazi fulminator Jewish on both sides) is not in Hungary (any more than Lagos, Nigeria during the British Empire was in England). Also, to my knowledge, there was just one Kissinger call to Fischer, and it was at my home. And it is a big surprise to see mention of "Brooklyn Community College" in Fischer's life, and conflicts with all we knew of him as a high-school dropout. As books go, these errors are trivial.

Of the new revelations, one of them showed me precisely why I am not a GM. In late 1972, Fischer's lawyer Marshall asked me to write a script for a proposed Warner Bros. record of Fischer teaching chess. Bobby would get $500,000 for starters, plus royalties from worldwide sales; surely his ghostwriter would get a pretty fraction, justifying his decision to become a chess professional. I wrote it, and Bobby backed out. The absurd reason: "If I make a mistake, ten years from now the Russians might make me look bad." Here I learn that Larry Evans also wrote a script for WB, and had the sense to ask, "Has Bobby signed a contract? No? Then I'd like $5000 up front." GM Evans got it. I got a yellowing manuscript.

The unsung hero of this saga is the Icelandic policeman Sammy Palsson, who became Fischer's aide, escort, bodyguard, chauffeur, psychologist, food-taster and nursemaid, for months. His only reward was a promise to accompany Bobby to the White House – but Fischer never got there, claiming that Nixon reneged on the invitation. Eventually Palsson returned to his family, with a paltry $500 honorarium from the USCF.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Edmonds & Eidinow, superior writers and diligent researchers, for a wealth of detail in bringing us back to those days of unparalleled excitement, when it was a thrill to be a chess-lover and a pride to be an American. We may have had a crook in the White House and a conflict-ridden society and were in the process of dispatching two million Southeast Asians to the next life, but still, we could sure play chess, couldn't we? Or at least, one of us could. Unfortunately, the rest of Fischer's life is anti-climax, and our hopes for a rich chess renaissance in America were not realized.