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*Winner of the Quill Award for Best Sports Book of 2007*
New York Times
Editors' Choice
Publishers Weekly
Best Breakout Book of 2007
Amazon.com Editors' Pick: Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2007
GAME OF KINGS
A Year Among the Oddballs and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team
by Michael Weinreb
“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.” —Chuck Klosterman, author of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School is one of New York’s public education success stories: a charter school that serves a diverse neighborhood of immigrants and minorities and ranks among the nation’s best high schools. At Murrow, there are no sports teams except for an unconventional group of kids that make up the school’s powerhouse chess team.
An award-winning, critically-acclaimed sports book as unconventional as the chess kids it features, GAME OF KINGS: A Year Among the Oddballs and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team (Gotham paperback; January 2, 2008) by sportswriter Michael Weinreb follows the members of the Murrow chess team through an entire season—from cash games in Washington Square Park to the SuperNationals in Nashville, where the scrappy team goes up against the country’s best. Along the way, Weinreb chronicles their lives so far, their rise toward maturity and adulthood, and their discovery of new and different worlds, all through their participation in (and at times, addiction to) a sport that has long been stigmatized as a refuge for hyper-intelligent social misfits.
Within the idiosyncratic team he discovers the 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 ingenious opening gambit named “The Orangutan;” and the Lithuanian immigrant and team star whose chess rating is climbing toward grandmaster status.
An inspiration to aspiring geniuses and students everywhere, GAME OF KINGS illuminates an inner-city school whose chess team succeeds against all odds.
About the Author
Michael Weinreb is a sportswriter whose work has appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times, New York Newsday, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, Slam Magazine, ESPN the Magazine, The Sporting News, The Los Angeles Times and The Dallas Morning News. Weinreb has been writing about sports professionally since attending high school in State College, Pennsylvania, and his work has been cited three times in the Best American Sports Writing Anthology, most recently in the 2005 edition. His book of short fiction, Girl Boy Etc., was published in 2004 by Red Dress Ink (he is, to this day, the first and only male author published by the imprint) and was called a “sharp, funny debut collection” by Publishers Weekly.
Weinreb is also the co-author of two books with National Basketball Association executive Pat Williams, including Marketing Your Dreams, which was named as one of ten nominees for the CASEY Award, given to the best baseball book of the year. Prior to moving to Manhattan, he was a sportswriter and columnist at the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal, where he was twice chosen as the top sportswriter in Ohio by the Associated Press and was nominated by the paper for a Pulitzer Prize for his work on a special section detailing the 30th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.
GAME OF KINGS
A Year Among the Oddballs and Geniuses
Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team
by Michael Weinreb
Gotham Books | January 2, 2008 | $15.00 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-592-40338-7
Gotham Books hardcover edition,
The Kings of New York, was published in March 2007
Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), was launched in 2003 by industry veteran William Shinker. Bestsellers that have helped to establish its solid foundation are Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Talk to the Hand, Game of Shadows, The Official eBay™ Bible, The Lucky Shopping Manual, Almost French, Letters to a Young Brother, The Miracle of St. Anthony, What Would Jackie Do, The Tao of Willie, It’s Called Work for a Reason, Do You, The House of Mondavi and Every Shot Must Have a Purpose. Penguin Group (USA) Inc. is one of the leading U.S. adult and children’s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks, including Berkley Books, Dutton, Frederick Warne, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Gotham Books, Grosset & Dunlap, New American Library, Penguin, Penguin Press, Philomel, Riverhead Books, and Viking, among others. Penguin Group is owned by Pearson plc, the international media group.
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