By Linnea Covington

Texas native Robert Jackson spent three and a half years compiling a complete history on a structure far from his home, something 33 million East Coasters pass through every year: the Holland Tunnel. Built in 1927, this daily part of New Yorkers’ lives was at the time the longest and largest of the vehicular tunnels in the entire world, and the first to utilize a ventilation system.

Robert Jackson

In Highway Under the Hudson, Jackson delves into not only the history of this famous tunnel but the drama behind its construction, the people involved and the unique engineering that took place.

What drew you to writing about the Holland Tunnel?
A few years ago, Director of New York University Press Steve Maikowski decided that a book on the Holland Tunnel needed to be written and he began searching for an author. I was recommended to him and was eager to accept the challenge due to my strong interest in the history of transportation engineering. After reading my history of the Eads Bridge, Steve decided that I was the right person to tackle the story and the rest, as they say, is history.

This is a very rich history; how did you start your research?
I began my research by contacting the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to see what records it retained from the state commissions that built the tunnel, before they merged with the Port Authority in 1930. Unfortunately, all of those records had been stored in the Port Authority library in the World Trade Center and were lost on 9/11. But the New York State Library and Archives in Albany and the New York Public Library had enough material to get me started. I also relied upon the C. M. Holland Collection at Case Western University and found other bits and pieces of documentation in other libraries as I went along.

What surprised you most about the Holland Tunnel?
When I began, I assumed that the tunnel had been built primarily for use by passenger vehicles, with truck traffic being of lesser importance. Just the opposite was true; it was built to facilitate the movement of freight from New Jersey to New York, with accommodation of passenger vehicles a secondary consideration. I was also surprised to find that, around the time of World War I, approximately 50 percent of the nation’s foreign trade annually passed through the port of New York.

What did not surprise me because I have studied other great construction projects but might surprise others is the cost in human life of building and maintaining a major piece of urban infrastructure. By my count, at least 14 workers died during construction of the tunnel, though it was thought that only 13 had died until I did my research. Also, two men, one firefighter and one patrol officer, died during the fire of 1949. It had previously been assumed that no one died because of the fire. In addition, two of the chief engineers died from overwork while the tunnel was under construction.

How does the Holland Tunnel compare to other large passenger tunnels?
There are many other vehicular tunnels that exceed the Holland Tunnel in size, length or visual beauty, but the Holland Tunnel holds a unique place in the history of tunnel engineering as the first such structure that was mechanically ventilated. It thus influenced the design of virtually every vehicular tunnel that that came after it. It will never relinquish its place as a seminal work of civil and mechanical engineering.

How long do you think the tunnel will last?
All great works of humankind are destined to fade away at some point, but, as the title of my last chapter states, the Holland Tunnel was built to last. I believe that with proper maintenance, it will remain in use long after you and I are gone.

The award-winning illustrator Ed Young will celebrate his 80th birthday this fall with the release of two new books and the launch of a one-man show about his work on countless children’s books over the years.

Young, who came to the United States from China 60 years ago, recently released the picture book, The House Baba Built, a memoir of his childhood in wartime China.

Trying to shield his family from the horrors of World War II, Young’s father, Baba, built a house to safeguard his wife and children. Soon, four other families were staying in the house with them, including one Jewish family that had escaped Nazi Germany.

Ed Young, children’s book illustrator.

Though the harsh realities of war surrounded them, laughter and games often filled the house, which Baba, a structural engineer, had designed in a creative and complex way with “floors between floors,” Young said.

“My father made it so we had an enjoyable childhood despite the chaos outside,” he said.

The idea to write The House Baba Built (Little, Brown, 2011) came to Young over 20 years ago, when he visited Shanghai for the first time since he left in 1951. He began writing notes then and when he visited again in 2004, he decided the book needed to be written.

“I realized I was the only one still alive who remembered the stories from that house and I wanted to put them together in a book that could be read,” he said.

Young illustrated the book in several different media, with torn and cut paper, pencil, chalk, pastel, ink, paint and photographs.

“It’s almost like a journal written in scrapbook form,” he said. “It was really a cleansing experience for me. Through writing it, I got to know myself in ways I never had before.”

Also this fall, Young’s illustrations can be seen in the new book, The Masterwork of a Painting Elephant, by Michelle Cuevas (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). This chapter book for kids ages 6-12 is about a boy named Pigeon and an artistically gifted white elephant who set out in search of fame and a lost love.

Young has written and/or illustrated over 85 books and has received numerous awards for his work. Young won the Caldecott Medal for Lon Po Po: A Red-Riding Hood Story from China and has twice been the U.S. nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. A three-time winner of both the Boston Globe Horn Book Award and the New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year, his other honors include five School Library Journal Best Books and five Booklist Editors’ choices.

Young will celebrate his 80th birthday at the end of November and shows no sign of slowing down. Currently working on another book, he will launch a one-man traveling show in Texas at the end of the month that will feature 15 of his latest books.

“I’m going to keep doing what I love doing,” he said. “I want to continue to explore different media, the possibility of telling stories in new ways. The future is about the unknown. I want to find new ways to grow and become a more proficient artist.”

No rivalry will ever serve as a better representation of New York City itself than that of the ruthlessly ambitious Robert Moses and the community-minded Jane Jacobs. Moses, the mercurial, all-powerful “master builder” responsible for everything from the Cross Bronx Expressway to Jones Beach, found his near-absolute power overthrown by urban activist Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and successful protest of Moses’ planned elevated thruway in Soho almost single-handedly destroyed the vision of cities as characterless, efficiency-driven monoliths that Moses had successfully propagated.

In The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs (out now in paperback), urban advocate—and longtime friend of Jacobs—Roberta Brandes Grazt examined the impact of Moses and Jacobs on the city in which she grew up and still resides, while also looking at the current state of New York City’s urban battles through the lens of both visions.

You come down pretty strongly in favor of Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses in Battle for Gotham.

Janet Jacobs.

Roberta Brandes Grazt: They are totally incompatible, and the only people who find “On the one hand this, and on the other hand that,” are the people who don’t have the guts to find that they are incompatible. You have to fish or cut bait. People always cite Moses’ parks [as positive outcomes of his work], but my point is a) there are beautiful parks all over this country that were not built by Robert Moses and b) look at all the beautiful waterfront parks we’re building today without Moses. Moses was about power, not about design. Unlimited power. There’s no room in unlimited power for what Jacobs is about.

If Moses was about the Big Idea, what was Jacobs about?

Jacobs is about process, not just about short blocks and mixed use. Those are the easy concepts of Jacobs. I have no patience for people who try to do a little bit of each. And the only way to do a little bit of each is to misinterpret Jacobs. She’s not about small-scale, period. She has nothing wrong with big-scale, if it’s done right and on the right thing. A skyscraper in the right place was fine!

Is there nothing redeeming about Moses for you?

Zip, zero, zilch. My main point is there was nothing Moses accomplished that couldn’t have been accomplished without the destruction and displacement of people, businesses and places with dictatorial power. Plenty of cities across this country wiped out neighborhoods with highways and city renewal, and they did it without Moses but with Moses’ example. Moses helped write the early laws; he was first in line for all the big funding; New York got the lion’s share of the funding and then he was hired by cities across the country to design highways and systems—some of which got built and some that didn’t. He set the pattern for the country.

The reality of how destructive it was is borne out in how many places are undoing that pattern today, and the vibrancy that is coming back because of that. The fact that we defeated Westway and have an over-the-top, highly developed, interestingly developed whole West Side. You can go to San Francisco, you can go to Milwaukee—I cite all these places in the book to show that the undoing of Moses’ pattern is what is helping cities today. The very undoing of it underscores the invalidity of it in its original form.

What Moses projects here in NYC would you like to see undone?

I think it would be a very interesting challenge to figure out how to reweave the isolated projects, like the towers in the park public housing projects, into the urban fabric so that people are connected and not isolated. The biggest sin of that era—and Moses was not the only one extolling it—was the separation of uses. I think there needs to be a way to bring back the corner store and mixed uses in the public spaces. And perhaps building some low-rise senior citizen housing on those sites so some tower residents can comfortably move in so they don’t have to leave the neighborhood. Undoing the BQE that so split South Brooklyn. These are big challenges!

As far as power is concerned, we fool ourselves into thinking there’s no Robert Moses today. The big developers are the power, the partnership of big developers with city government. You can’t stand in the way of [Bruce] Ratner; our planning structure is an expediter for big development. It’s another form of overwhelming top-down power.

What do you think about the proposed Upper East Side waste transfer station?

Nobody wants those things in their own backyard. The fact is, they have been over-concentrated in neighborhoods, and until they are fairly distributed so that neighborhoods are responsible for their own garbage, where’s the equity? I also think that if people are so concerned about waste transfer in their neighborhood, then what they should really be concerned about is a massive recycling program to sensitize people to the fact that if they aren’t more recycling-minded, they’re going to have more garbage trucks in their neighborhood. There are ways to diminish the garbage.

And how do you feel about bike lanes?

Robert Moses with the Battery Bridge model.

They’re the best thing to happen to this city since sliced bread! And if you want to talk about undoing Moses! I’m always amused when I see Janette Sadik-Khan referred to as a Moses because she’s done bike lanes on a big scale. Well, excuse me, that’s Jane Jacobs on a big scale! Moses had no interest in any form of transportation other than cars, but streets were supposed to be for people.

Transportation is a multimodal kind of thing, and we have so let the population assume cars have the most important right that it’s very hard to accept. I find it particularly outrageous of areas in Brooklyn where former or present officials want their official car privileges and they live within walking distance of perfectly good subway service. They don’t have to ride bikes, they can ride the subway—they shouldn’t be so dependent on their car. I have no patience for people who think the car should be dominant.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons photos

Film writer Sam Wasson has made a name for himself with books that shed new light on familiar subjects. After chronicling the films of director Blake Edwards in A Splurch in the Kisser, Wasson narrowed his sights to a single Edwards film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The result was last summer’s buzziest book, the New York Times bestselling Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.

Joining the newly released paperback edition of Fifth Avenue this month is Wasson’s latest book, another examination of mostly New York City-based films and a valiant demand to consider Paul Mazursky in the same breath as other rule-bending, iconoclastic ’70s directors like Scorsese and Coppola. With a series of interviews with Mazursky, his actors and colleagues, Wasson makes a convincing case for Mazursky’s right to a wider critical reappraisal. We caught up with Wasson over the phone and discussed the most romantic romantic movie of all time, the reasons why Mazursky has slipped from the public consciousness and the Holy Grail of show biz stories.

Sam Wasson.

Have you been consciously choosing topics that are hiding in plain sight?
You want to hit the sweet spot of the cultural consciousness. If it is too far remote, no one will give a shit. And if it’s already conscious, then it’s already been done. So you’re trying to walk this fine line between what’s available and what’s yet to be done.

What prompted you to write Fifth Avenue?
I had written A Splurch in the Kisser. And Edwards did this slapstick stuff, and Tiffany’s was an anomaly. When it came time to write that chapter in the book, I thought it would be an easy ride through. But there was almost nothing written about the movie. Some bits in Audrey Hepburn books, but nothing substantial. And the idea to write a book about this, the most romantic romantic movie of all time—the playing field was wide open. I basically wrote the book that I was looking for while writing the Blake Edwards book. Mazursky was an act of love; Tiffany’s was about continuing the conversation in my head.

You make a pretty solid case for Mazursky as the least acclaimed auteur of ’70s Hollywood.
There are a lot of reasons for that. But really, he didn’t fit with the image of the rest of the guys, with the Scorsese and the Coppola. Mazursky made nothing like Bonnie and Clyde. [His movies] were soft, they were tender. And put that up against a Mean Streets or a Rosemary’s Baby and you’re talking about a guy who was not a part of what everyone else was doing. And of course, he was older than those guys.

What were you most surprised by while researching Tiffany’s?
How racy the part was for the time. When it was released, it was so hot that Paula Strasberg told Marilyn Monroe to not take the movie. And Audrey Hepburn was worried that as a new mother, it would ruin her image. After the film was released, people were offended by the image of a call girl. So much about Tiffany’s was somewhat morally dubious.
Also that they shot two endings, and that the ending we have is the second ending, written by Blake Edwards.

And with Mazursky?
How comparatively easy it was to have a movie made in the late ’70s and ’80s. They would greenlight a script based on an idea, based on your own track record. The amount of integrity, the amount of fraternity that went on in the business, the sense that we’re all in this together. It was show business, absolutely, and people were in it to make money, but they also loved each other. That I found unbelievably moving.

Your next book is going to be about another ’70s filmmaker who rewrote the rules, Bob Fosse. How did you go from Mazursky to Fosse?
All That Jazz is the definitive show business movie, and to me, a guy who makes his living telling show biz stories, it has always been the Holy Grail. But the image of Fosse in All That Jazz is not the full man. I think it’s true of all of us that if we were to write our story, it would not be the story, it would be a version of the story. And All That Jazz had few of the joys of being Bob Fosse.

Any discussion of Rosanne Cash these days must include some reference to her lively, busy Twitter page, which details everything from the new shoes she bought to the things she worries about at three in the morning. This being Cash, however, her 3 a.m. fears aren’t the usual insomniac’s. Instead of mortality, she wondered on Twitter “What if there’s a sprinkler & it goes off when I’m sleeping & my red hair color gets on the pillow & someone thinks it’s blood.” Cash saves her dark nights of the soul for her music.

Cash greeted questions about her life on Twitter with a laugh. “I have a lot of manic energy and it’s a good place to dump it so I don’t have to carry it around with me,” she said.

One of the more engaging celebrities on Twitter, Cash shrugged off the suggestion that she might have enjoyed the social network when she was a Nashville hitmaker in the 1980s. “I think it would have been awkward. I didn’t have as good a sense of myself,” she said. And certainly the Internet trolls who come out of the shadows to attack her for her liberal views would have been even more unnerving than they are today.

“They’re so vicious,” Cash said. “A lot of them will use my dad to attack me, ‘He would be so ashamed of you!’” She paused. “Sometimes I just choose to see them as figures of my subconscious, just to put a perspective on it. ‘These are not real, they’re just a little nightmare that I can wake up from.’”

And Cash certainly has enough on her plate to shrug off the occasional attacks on her Twitter page. In addition to her usual summertime touring schedule, this year she’s celebrating the paperback release of her lilting memoir Composed and the release this past spring of the Essential Rosanne Cash, a must-have for fans of both country music and singer-songwriters, and somehow found the time to write songs for an upcoming album, her first since 2009’s The List and her first album of new material since 2006’s Black Cadillac.

“We’re trying to get T Bone Burnett to produce, if he’s not too busy,” Cash confided. “I’m in the middle of writing songs. I was trying to describe [the new album’s sound] to somebody; some of it is very rootsy, some of it is very tough and some of it is very Julie London. I’m really digging it,” she said.

As for making the press rounds for Composed again, Cash is weary but game. “I want to spend some time in my own kitchen and just think and not do,” she said from the road. A decade in the writing, Composed is a wry and carefully observed memoir that shies away from digging too deep beneath Cash’s persona, while giving away as much personal information as she deems appropriate. An easy book to read, Composed couldn’t have been an easy one to write. Cash remembers her editor insisting on including what she didn’t think was necessary: the eulogies she delivered over the course of two years for her stepmother, father and mother, a series of losses that inspired the haunting Black Cadillac.

“It was like the—I hate to say nadir, but the center dark point. I argued with my editor quite a lot about it, actually,” Cash said. “And he felt so strongly about it that I capitulated. And I thought framing it in what I wore to each funeral was a nice psychological device, to balance out the mourning. On the hardest days of your life, to think about what I’m gonna wear—I thought that made it more poetic.”

Cash’s fans already know that she has a knack for finding the poetry—and salvation—in the darkness. She wouldn’t admit it on Twitter, but surely that’s what she’s really doing at three in the morning.

Cash will be signing copies of Composed 7 p.m., Aug. 9, Barnes and Noble, 33 E. 17th St. & 7 p.m., Aug. 11, powerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., Brooklyn.

That is where she began her acting career, and where she authored and set parts of her three novels, The Shiksa Syndrome, Looking for Mr. Goodfrog and You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, which will be reissued next year.

Graff, who played “Frenchy” in Broadway’s Grease, speaks nostalgically of the early days of living on the Upper West Side.

Laurie Graff.

“After the show the 104 bus would be filled with actors from all of the shows, still in makeup, riding the bus uptown to go home,” she said.

Her first book, bestselling You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, which features protagonist Karrie Kline, Graff’s alter-ego and a fearless if sometime vulnerable woman searching for true love, was originally set on the Upper East Side. Partway through the writing, she switched the setting.

“The West Side, my soul, had to be my character’s soul too. Ever since the movie The Goodbye Girl, I just knew it was my spot,” she said.

The neighborhood continues to be her muse.

“Everything about the Upper West Side for me says home. When I walk down the street, run the reservoir, get my pants hemmed at Sammy the tailor, or fight my way through the tight aisles of Fairway, I know there’s no other place I’d rather be,” she said. “That specificity lives inside me. It’s a perspective. And it’s mine.”

Melvin Jules Bukiet woke up near midnight more than a decade ago with the concept and name “Scribblers on the Roof” in his head.

Bukiet, an author, professor at Sarah Lawrence College and co-owner of KGB Bar, which hosts literary readings for authors, started the Scribbler on the Roof series with the adult education group at the Anche Chesed Synagogue on West 100th Street not long after his dream. Its goal, to bring Jewish authors across all genres to the community. Events are held throughout the summer on the Synagogue’s roof.

“The adult education group at the shul thought it might be a lovely idea. The aim was to foster all good things literature and community,” Bukiet said.

The series brings a host of authors to the community. Past authors that have participated include the edgy T. Gertler, author of Elbowing the Seducer, poets Adam Kirsch and Anna Rabinowitz, Steve Stern, winner of the Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award, and even Bukiet himself.

“Sometime we’ve made obvious matches and sometimes we have made counterintuitive choices,” he said.

For more information about the Scribblers on the Roof series, visit anschechesed.org.

Upper West Side as Muse
Upper West Side Scribblers on the Roof

Why the neighborhood continues to inspire authors, and some of the great reads (old and new) that are set just outside your door

By Beth Mellow

The Green family as portrayed in Katharine Weber’s The Little Women are a creative and intellectual bunch living in a sprawling and somewhat messy Upper West Side apartment. Mom is a professor and dad is an inventor. All three sisters engage in artistic pursuits including music, art and writing. When the family is shaken by infidelity, the two younger sisters decide to leave home and follow their oldest sibling to New Haven, where she’s beginning her junior year at Yale University.

Weber, whose memoir The Memory of All That comes out later this month, explained that she made the Upper West Side the home of the Greens because “they just seem to me like the quintessential Upper West Side family in certain ways that are hard to define—political, economic, personalities and work.”

Rosemary's Baby

While a slew of novels, from Theodore Dreiser’s early 20th-century classic Sister Carrie to more recent books like Cathleen Schine’s The New Yorkers, are set against an Upper West Side backdrop, the neighborhood’s character at first glance seems almost amorphous and, as Weber says, “hard to define.”

Compared to its northern neighbor Harlem, which is recognized as a hotbed of literary talent and inspiration, the feel and character of the Upper West Side can sometimes be much more subtle. Nevertheless, on closer examination it becomes clear that authors set their books on the Upper West Side when they want their characters to engage in an enriching intellectual and creative life.

“The West Side has been an intellectual center because of Columbia University,” said Lewis Frumkes, director of Hunter College’s Writing Center. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, there was a quaint little pastry shop called Éclair on West 72nd Street that catered to the German-Jewish psychoanalysts and intellectuals. You felt as if you were in Vienna.”

Laurie Graff, former actress and author of three novels including the bestseller You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, which will be reissued next year, said the Upper West Side has always carried an artistic, intellectual cache that’s inspired authors.

“My first apartment was on West End Avenue,” she said. “I shared it with three other actors. It was the artsy and bohemian ’hood to live in.”

The idea of the West Side as the hotspot for artists and intellectuals is not only evident in Weber’s The Little Women, but also in other books set on the Upper West Side, including Ira Levin’s classic thriller Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary’s husband Guy, who ultimately makes a deal with the devil in an effort to boost his floundering career, is an actor. The main character in Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet is an intellectual and occasional lecturer at Columbia University. Leonard Schiller, the main character in Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening, is an elderly, out-of-print author. The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez opens a window for readers into the cultural revolution of the late ’60s, having the main characters in the novel start out as students at Barnard College. One of the characters eventually leaves college to work at a magazine, but chooses to live on West 96th Street, where she finds a boyfriend in her apartment building that is a drummer in a band.

Ron Hogan, a literary blogger and founder of Beatrice.com, said that the Upper West Side has “always been more than one kind of neighborhood,” with a cross-section of New York on display.

He points out that when subway service to the neighborhood became available, “it led to cheaper housing for service workers who would commute to jobs downtown, but also for young white-collar professionals.”

In The New Yorkers, Cathleen Schine tells the stories of a motley group of dog owners, including a thirty-something teacher named Jody, who found her rent-controlled studio apartment decades earlier when she was in college. Jody’s block is still not touched by gentrification and still affordable for secretaries and window washers, as well as struggling artists and musicians.

In addition to the artists, actors, teachers and writers who live on the Upper West Side of novels, there are also the psychologists who want to counsel them.

“I have tons of shrink friends up there. The area is rivaled only by all of the Greenwich Village shrinks,” said Susan Shapiro, author of Speed Shrinking, a book about a Manhattan-based self-help author who sees eight psychologists in as many days.

In fact, Elizabeth Benedict, author of The Practice of Deceit, makes the Upper West Side the home of her main character, a psychologist named Eric, at the beginning of her novel. While the setting may have fit because of his occupation, Benedict had other reasons for choosing the neighborhood.

“[Eric’s] a nearly middle-aged guy who’s economically low-key, unpretentious and not interested in any particular cultural scenes, which very much jives with my sense of the neighborhood. If I’d put Eric on the East Side or Tribeca, I think readers would have had different expectations of him,” she said.

Across literature, the West Side has also been recognized as the heart of Jewish culture.  The main character in Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet also happens to be a Holocaust survivor. More recent books, like Graff’s The Shiksa Syndrome, a story about a Jewish woman who pretends to be a “shiksa” (non-Jewish woman) to catch a Jewish guy, details the Upper West Side Jewish singles scene.

Although some believe that the Upper West Side captured in the pages of our favorite books portray the neighborhood accurately, others disagree.

“I think the Upper West Side was like this 20 or 25 years ago, there were a lot of psychologists, actors, and run-off from Columbia. Now, it’s populated more by affluent couples and families,” Dorian Thornley, co-owner of West Sider Books, said.

Melvin Jules Bukiet, author, co-owner of KGB Bar and developer of Scribblers on the Roof, a Jewish literary series hosted by  the West Side Synagogue Ansche Chesed, said that the Upper West Side described in books was as fanciful as it was in the novels that were set there.

“If only life here was as intelligent and literary as it is in the books we read. I think the concerns tend to be more financial,” he said.

Bukiet does makes a clarification, though.

“Where you set a story is costume dressing. What you have to get right is the inner workings of the characters.”

Did we miss one of your favorite novels set on the UWS? Email the editor at ahouston@manhattanmedia.com.

By Megan Finnegan

Not many writers get the chance to revisit their most famous work.

Upper West Side author and professor Frank Brady, 76, has been given that chance. His latest book, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall – From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness, was released Feb. 2.

Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Brady first profiled the chess champion in 1964, in Profile of a Prodigy: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer. At the time, Fischer had not yet developed his streak of hatred towards America and the Jewish people. He was simply a rising star in the chess world, and Brady knew him personally from a young age.

“Fischer was just on his way up. But being a chess player and knowing him, I’d played in tournaments and directed tournaments and so forth that he’d played in,” said Brady. “I had the feeling instinctively that he was going to become World Champion.”

Brady convinced a publisher that Fischer would become an internationally famous figure and that the book would take off. In 1972, Fischer defeated the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky to become world champion, and Brady’s book became one of the top-selling chess books of all time.

The West Sider is a chess master in his own right. He’s president of the Marshall Chess Club, and has acted as arbiter of several international chess tournaments. He first learned the game from his brother when he was 9 years old, and played through his early teenage years, when he really got into the game.

One day in Forest Park in Queens, he stopped to watch some men playing chess at stone tables nearby. A man in his mid-twenties invited him to play. He proceeded to lose game after game.

As darkness fell, Brady couldn’t walk away from the challenge, so he invited his companion to come back to his parents’ house, where they played chess until the next morning. After Brady instructed his new buddy to hide under the bed so his parents wouldn’t discover he had stayed up all night, they went back to the park to spend the next day at the stone chess tables.

“Something grabbed me, because I lost every game against this man, and my ego couldn’t take it! I had to somehow learn to beat him. And so we played. And we became best friends,” Brady said.

He was hooked. He started a chess club at the Highland Park YMCA when he was still a teen. Brady then went to college at SUNY Buffalo and earned his MFA in writing from Columbia. In 1960, he founded Chess Life, converting the United States Chess Federation’s newspaper into the glossy magazine it still is today. He even published three issues of   out of his one-bedroom apartment; the short-lived publication is still talked about in inner circles.

After Profile of a Prodigy established him as a chess expert and writer, Brady continued as a biographer, first writing about Hugh Hefner, with whom he had previously worked at Playboy, followed by a publisher-commissioned book on Barbra Streisand. In 1978, he published a biography on Aristotle Onassis.

In the ’80s, he took a Masters in film program at NYU, and discovered that there was no definitive biography of Orson Welles, leading Brady to write Citizen Welles. It took him several years, as he worked toward his doctorate in communications. Next, he wrote The Publisher, released in 2000, a biography of newspaperman and scientist Paul Block.

By then, he had received offers to revisit Fischer, but it never felt like the right time. The Fischer that he had known as a young man had become a different person, living in exile in Iceland and writing sympathetic letters to Osama Bin Laden.

On his deathbed, Fischer told a friend to mention something to Brady, and that was the first he had heard from the ex-chess champ in many years.

When Fischer died, Brady began considering writing another book.

He set to work, delving into Fischer’s life and uncovering facts that had never been reported.

“A lot of people think it’s just an update of my earlier book,” Brady said. “It’s not.”

Dr. Brady has been married to his wife, Maxine, for 48 years, and speaks proudly of her accomplishments; she just released Chess Masterpieces, an illustrated book about the history of the game. He insists that sharing professional interests makes the couple collaborative, not competitive.

“It’s like having two doctors in the house; we consult all the time,” he said.

Brady taught undergraduate journalism at Barnard College for 20 years, and now chairs the department of Communications at St. John’s University. When he speaks about chess, he seems as excited as he must have been that day in the park, when he first became enthralled with the game.

“I feel like every time I play a game of chess, win lose or draw, my IQ goes up like a point. It’s like completing a really tough New York Times crossword puzzle,” he said. “You feel like, ‘Wow, I did that.’”

By James Lobo

Pete Bodo has man-paws. One of them wraps around a Guinness and the other lies flat on a table, in the back room of Dublin House on West 79th street, just blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive. The outdoorsman is talking about his new hunting memoir.

“One of the great things about this country is that any knucklehead can go out there and get a hunting license and have the opportunity to engage nature,” said the author and senior editor at Tennis magazine, who periodically escapes to his 150-acre property in the Catskills to get his wildlife fix.

Peter Bodo in his UWS apartment. Photo by Andrew Schwartz

Whitetail Nation: My Season in Pursuit of the Monster Buck, released Nov. 15, is Bodo’s own story. He zigzags the country, from New York to Montana to Texas, with rifle, bow and doe urine in tow, chasing the giant deer of his fantasy and craving a set of record-breaking antlers to hang over his mantle. Bodo hopes that his story—published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—will not only reach his camo-wearing compatriots during hunting season (Nov. 20 through Dec. 12 for southern New York state), but also the rest of the country, whose closest contact with a deer was watching Bambi.

“What I was hoping to do was write a book that anybody can pick up and enjoy if they have even the slighte st interest in the outdoors and interest in why people still hunt,” he said.

Bodo, 61, hunted critters as a kid in the woods of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When he was 12, he went deer hunting for the first time with his father, who shot and wounded a huge buck but lost it after tracing its blood through the woods for hours. He discovered his passion for writing in the 8th grade, when he won a composition contest. Around the same time, he abandoned hunting, jarred by guilt after shooting a woodchuck that he discovered was pregnant. After attending Seton Hall University, he moved to New York, where he started covering tennis. It wasn’t until his buddy invited him to go on a hunt that his love of the outdoors reignited. Today, he frequents the woods upstate, a leafy contrast to the concrete of the Upper West Side, where he lives with his wife Lisa, 8-year-old son Luke and a red-tick hound (incidentally named Buck).

A self-described contrarian, Bodo takes pleasure in being the lone, orange-capped hunter in a city full of urbanites, where camouflage is worn as a hipster fashion statement. “I smile every time I see some girl on 28th Street,” he said. “Some little model going off to one of her look-sees and she’s got sequined camo pants on.”

Not everyone understands his weekend hunting getaways upstate, where he helps keep the deer population in check. Especially here, in a city full of environmentalists and animal rights activists, people just don’t get it. His son gets quizzical looks from kids at school when they hear his father has guns, something that would be commonplace in North Dakota or rural Pennsylvania.

“Some people really think that what you’re doing is wrong,” Bodo said. “Morally wrong. ‘It’s indefensible.’ ‘It’s cruel.’ The cruelty thing is pretty tough. Who likes to think of themselves as a cruel person?” Bodo says some people don’t agree with his view of the human-animal relationship. “I don’t feel that animal life is sacred per se,” he said. “I just don’t believe that. I think our job is to manage animals and to treat them as humanely as possible.”

Ryan Huling, from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—an animal rights organization with over two million members and supporters—represents this opposition.

“Although it was a crucial part of human survival 100,000 years ago, hunting is now nothing more than a violent form of recreation,” Huling said. “It’s a cruel, insensitive act.”

In view of such attitudes, Bodo hopes the book will help alleviate the conflict between environmentalists and hunters. He wants people to understand what drives him to shoot deer: the oneness with nature, the meditative way your mind wanders in the woods, coming home to a hot fireplace after a day alone in a tree in a snowstorm. Not to mention the sustainability of killing your own dinner. That key word, sustainability, is something that hunters and environmentalists both agree on.

“If the economy tanks tomorrow and your family is pretty hungry, you’d go out and kill a deer without thinking twice,” he said. He argues that shooting his own deer to eat is more sustainable than buying mass-produced meat in the refrigerated section of Stop & Shop.

He tries, with varying degrees of success, to nudge his son Luke out into the wild yonder, a place that has grown completely foreign to youths in today’s urban society. “He’s caught a couple of fish,” Bodo said, grinning. “He kisses them on the head before we put them back.”