13 January 2017

Sourcing a Chess Talk

The description of this Youtube video gives only excerpts from the Wikipedia pages on Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. What more can we add?

The speaker is introduced as 'BBC Journalist John Eidinow' and the clip's first subtitle adds, 'John Eidinow, co-author "Bobby Fischer Goes to War". Neither Eidinow nor the book has a Wikipedia page, but the book is well known to chess players as Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How A Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine (amazon.com) by David Edmonds and John Eidinow.


Bobby Fischer and the Most Notorious Chess Match of All Time (46:54) • Dated 29 March 2004: 'Published on Jan 12, 2017'

The talk starts with a discussion of a first book by Edmonds and Eidinow, Wittgenstein's Poker (wikipedia.org; the title refers to a fireplace poker, not the game of poker):-

'Wittgenstein's Poker: The Story of a Ten-Minute Argument Between Two Great Philosophers' is a 2001 book by BBC journalists David Edmonds and John Eidinow about events in the history of philosophy involving Sir Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, leading to a confrontation at the Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club in 1946.

The clip is on Youtube channel 'The Film Archives', which has a related channel, 'The Book Archive'; both use the same logo, a white 'T' in a purple square. The clip carries the logo 'Book TV C-SPAN2' and a further subtitle 'Washington, DC; Politics and Prose'. From Wikipedia's Book TV:-

Book TV is the name given to weekend programming on the American cable network C-SPAN2 airing from 8 a.m. Eastern Time Saturday morning to 8 a.m. Eastern Time Monday morning each week. The 48-hour block of programming is focused on non-fiction books and authors, featuring programs in the format of interviews with authors as well as live coverage of book events from around the country.

I once wrote a brief review of the book -- Bobby Fischer Goes to War (archive.org -> chess.about.com; May 2004) -- and was happy to rediscover it through this clip. By coincidence I gave the book the same rating, 4 1/2 stars out of 5, as the average of the 110 Amazon.com customer reviews.

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