Word Freak: A Journey Into the Eccentric World of the Most Obsessive Board Game Ever Invented

by StefanFatsis (Author)

• Prizes: ','1','ChildrenBookAge: ','Book Overview: \'Stefan Fatsis is the Hunter S. Thompson of competitive scrabble\' - The Times','This book has come close to ruining my life... Within two pages I was hooked. This is an enthralling and wonderfully written elegy * Daily Telegraph *
  A remarkable book * Independent *
  A quirky account of a very peculiar practice * Herald *
  A very funny book -- Lynn Barber
  An amiable memoir of self-inflicted obsession * Times Literary Supplement *','Stefan Fatsis covers the business of sport for The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and is very good at Scrabble.');">

  Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.25

  For many, Scrabble is merely a board game. For others it is an intellectual pilgrimage. In this book, Stefan Fatsis, journalist and self-confessed word freak, goes in search of the people for whom Scrabble is life and affords us a glimpse into the extraordinary world of the brilliant geeks and misfit savants who populate the highest ranks of the game. Playing competitively in tournaments across the world, Fatsis chronicles the story of how Scrabble has grown from a diversion invented by an unemployed architect during The Great Depression into the hugely successful, challenging and beloved game of today.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $13.20

  For many, Scrabble is merely a board game. For others it is an intellectual pilgrimage, a balancing act between language and mathematics, simultaneously joyful and frustrating. In Word Freak Stefan Fatsis charts the history and theory of the game alongside his own rise from livingroom player to competitive shark, and affords us a glimpse into the extraordinary world of the brilliant geeks and misfit savants who populate the highest ranks of the game. The top Scrabble players marshal the weird, hidden forces of the mind in their quest for greatness; they form cliques and petty jealousies; schadenfraude is a popular sensation; their favourite noise is that of a shaking bag of small tiles. In an effort to understand the depth of obsession plumbed by the players, Fatsis meets experts in neurochemistry, memory, linguistics and probability, as well as those players who form Scrabble's darker underworld. Witty and profound, Word Freak is about sports and competition, the human mind and its interior workings, drive, desire and loneliness. And huge lists of words with no meaning at all.