Product Description

An award-winning sportswriter takes you inside a year with the nation’s top high school chess team.

With strict admission standards and a progressive curriculum, Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School has long been one of New York’s public-education success stories, serving a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranking among the nation’s best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams, and the closest thing to jocks are found on the school’s powerhouse chess team, which annually competes for the national championship.

In The Kings of New York sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season, from cash games in Washington Square Park to city and state tournaments to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where this eclectic bunch competes against private schoolers and suburbanites. Along the way, Weinreb brings to life a number of colorful characters: the Yale-educated calculus teacher (and former semipro hockey player) who guides the savants while struggling to find funding for his team; an aspiring rapper and tournament hustler who plays with cutthroat instinct; the team’s lone girl, a shy Ukrainian immigrant; the Puerto Rican teen from the rough neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant who plays an ingenious opening gambit named the Orangutan; and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.

In the bestselling tradition of such books as Word Freak and Friday Night Lights, The Kings of New York is a riveting look inside the world of competitive chess and an inspiring profile of young genius.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #349699 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Weinreb, whose work has appeared three times in The Best American Sports Writing, offers the story of a year spent with Brooklyn's Edward R. Murrow High School chess team as it strives for a national championship. Weinreb makes several choices that work well for a year-in-the-life account. For one, he eschews unnecessary speculation about the teen chess prodigies' psychology, a strategy that taken with his deft reporting of how they view themselves and one another renders them more accessible, more natural and consequently more interesting. Weinreb also expands his arena by investigating the cultural milieu of the modern chess world. He describes what it takes to be a successful high-level chess player, the difficulties women have in this world, the very nature of the game and the phenomenon of the chess prodigy, using the experience of Josh Waitzkin, who has now retired from competitive chess and was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. All this is supported by well-chosen detail, intelligence and terrific writing. Weinreb clearly develops an affection for the eclectic members of the team, and because of the skill he brings to his project, so will his readers. B&w illus. (Mar. 1)
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Review
The Kings of New York is about chess in the same way that Darcy Frey's The Last Shot was about basketball. Michael Weinreb's real subjects are the nature of talent, the onset of adolescence, and the kingdom of Brooklyn. This is a wonderful book. -- Mark Kriegel, author of Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich and Namath: A Biography

The Kings of New York isn't so much a book about high school chess as it is an unforgettable journey into the blessing and curse of adolescent genius. With a narrative rich in voice-a gathering of intoxicating characters-Michael Weinreb has delivered nothing short of a generational classic. This is a stunning book. You won't soon forget it. -- Adrian Wojnarowski, author of The Miracle of St. Anthony

Michael Weinreb has done a heroic job doing something once thought impossible-making an eminently readable topic out of chess. Part Word Freak, part Season on the Brink, The Kings of New York is a gripping inside look at an endearingly quirky subculture. -- L. Jon Wertheim, author of Transition Game and Venus Envy

Writing with the deft, propulsive style of a young Frank Deford, Michael Weinreb has captured both the intellectual insanity-and the curious normalcy-of what it's like to be a teenaged super-genius. The Kings of New York is the Friday Night Lights of high school chess. -- Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV

Review
“In this thrilling, vigorously reported, deeply empathic book, Michael Weinreb . . . brings to vivid life a contemporary chess world suffused with its own updated version of nerd machismo.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Fascinating. . . . [Game of Kings] does for high school chess what Buzz Bissinger’s 1991 bestseller, Friday Night Lights, did for high school football.”
—USA Today

“Writing with the deft, propulsive style of a young Frank Deford, Michael Weinreb has captured both the intellectual insanity—and the curious normalcy—of what it’s like to be a teenaged super-genius. [Game of Kings] is the Friday Night Lights of high school chess.”
—Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV

Customer Reviews

The Kids Are All Right
The Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn has been a successful progressive school, whether despite or because of its mixture of Puerto Rican and black students along with immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. It has been a radical experiment in public education, allowing pupils to skip classes and to make up their own schedules, curricula, or independent study projects. There has been a high level of student graduation and subsequent enrollment in college. The school might now be succumbing to No Child Left Behind mediocrity because it is being forced to admit students who are refugees from neighboring schools that have been closed due to failing their evaluations, but one of its brightest successes has been its chess team. The team won its first NYC championship in 1989 and has gone on to national championships. This meant that they were up against lots of other schools with teams that could afford tutors or chess camps during the summers. _The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team_ (Gotham Books) thus has the dependable appeal of a David vs. Goliath story, as sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the striving, scrappy students while they aimed toward another national championship. Though the book conveys excitement in the competition, as any sports book ought to, it is most rewarding in its picture of awkward teens being able to fasten onto something meaningful before turning into adults.

The Murrow team is the brainchild of Eliot Weiss, a former hockey player, ski instructor, beer vendor, and taxi driver who more than anything else wanted to be a math teacher. He does some coaching and teaching, but plenty of his students are far better players than he is. He works at organizing trips to tournaments, and a lot of what he does is drumming up money for the travel and for entry fees and for pizza to recharge the players. The kids are the heart of the book. Weinreb spends some pages on each of the main players, telling about their backgrounds and families. There is Oscar Santana, a Puerto Rican prodigy who is a whiz at chess but can't focus on his schoolwork. He does, however, bring home a straight A report card. Unfortunately, he did so by hacking the Board of Education computer and boosting his grades. Oscar brings home chess trophies so regularly that his family can't display them; they started storing them in garbage bags, and then started throwing them away. Also winning trophies is Alex Lenderman, a little Russian émigré, the second-highest rated 15-year-old chess player in America, but he knows that big trophies are just something else to lug through the subway system. What Alex, and the others, really want is to win some money, which they can do in a small way through tournament prizes, and in a larger way though wagering on games, often "blitz" chess played in lightning-fast games timed by a chess clock set to three minutes or even one minute. Alex's foe is blond Lithuanian Sal Bercys; the two players dislike each other but have mutual respect. When they are pitted against each other in tournaments, they choose to play out staged (and not strictly legal) draw games, but afterwards go at each other seriously in blitz versions. Sal grows throughout the book, becoming a stronger player by accepting his weaknesses. There are plenty of other supporting characters, and like the main ones, they wear baggy and unsupported pants, they love hip hop music, they can't figure out girls, they can't get enough pizza , or they keep ear buds firmly in place at all times.

As Weinreb asks, what is the point of these kids continuing to play an infuriating and exacting game, when they get almost no recognition, especially compared to kids who win spelling bees or even hot-dog-eating contests? The "notion of chess as a charity, as an educational tool, as a cultural equalizer in underprivileged neighborhoods" is a relatively new one, and holds considerable potential for social change. About a kid named Shawn who plays brilliant blitz chess but can't display energy for much of anything else, a teacher asks, "Where would Shawn be _without_ chess? What would his life be like then?" And maybe some of them are going to get a sort of living from the game, but more realistically they might get benefits like scholarships, so there must be some value to the endeavor. Weinreb, however, quotes a chess instructor who points out that they already have gotten the value, in becoming mentally tougher, more creative, more acute at solving problems: "The benefit will last the rest of their lives." They live in a strange world of their own, and don't worry if you don't know about chess, for it is all explained at a layman's level here and requires no previous expertise. Weinreb's gift is that he has been able to invite us into that world and make us care about the oddballs that live there.

Journalism at its Finest!
When I received a review copy of this book I will admit I was nervous of a couple things. First, there were some odd reviews here at Amazon that mentioned negativity and second I had to wonder between Waitzkin's 'Searching For Bobby Fischer' and Sawaski's novel 'The Chess Team' could the author bring me something new and different about scholastic chess. Weinreb really had his work cut out for him when I openend the book. In the end though, he met or exceeded all of my expectations and comes out with a rating of 5 stars! I'm not sure where the negativity originated, posssibly rivals of Murrow (the school depicted in the book) or what not, but Weinreb is clearly a darn good writer. There were a couple of typos in the manuscript, however, certainly nothing that blocked the flow or anything like that. His writing is clear, concise and he has an entertaining voice. The book was highly original. Nobody has ever followed a high school chess team before. Weinreb not only follows the team on chess tournaments, he digs in deep. He tells about the school and all the people around the school. Further, he tells about the chess world these kids are involved in and many of the figures and personalities it accompanies as well. He explains things that may not be clear to newcomers and he gives a solid history of what has happened to not just the players, but for scholastic chess in general. I have been a scholastic chess player and chess coach for almost three decades of my life and even I learned a thing or two about Murrow's process. The only tick I had with the book was some of the profanity that was used. Although it was done tastefully, and is correct journalism and Weinreb did his job keeping things 'real' ... This is a very minor opinion, but I just wasn't sure it should have been in the book because we're dealing with minors in general. In all though, Weinreb did an outstanding job with this book and I give it my full recommendation. If you have any attraction to scholastic chess whatsoever, then you will enjoy reading this book. I would not be surprised if this book won some sort of journalism award.

This is not a book about chess
This is not a book about chess; this is a book about a teacher, a mild obsession, the impact of a profound interest on a city school, and how all of that can come together to make a huge difference.

It is also a prime example of how good writing can take an interesting story and turn it into a gripping book. This is the Stand and Deliver of board games, and it is great fun (especially if you like chess and/or you are from Brooklyn, and/or you grew up there). I had a great time reading it.