Frank Brady: Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

In "A Psychological Autopsy of Bobby Fischer" from the periodical, "Miller-McCune", Joseph G. Ponterotto wrote: Unfortunately, Bobby Fischer’s dramatic rise to world pre-eminence and equally dramatic descent into isolation and mental instability is a life path not unique to him or to chess. To be sure, Paul Morphy, the New Orleans chess prodigy who played a century earlier than Bobby, also lapsed into a state of delusion, in his case centered on belief that he was being persecuted by his brother-in-law, the executor of his father’s estate. But outside the field of chess, one can find countless examples of prodigies who succumbed to stress and intense career expectations. The musical genius of Michael Jackson, the acting and singing gift of Judy Garland, and the poetry and prose brilliance of Sylvia Plath represent but a few examples of promising talent undermined by mental health problems insufficiently dealt with, or left untended altogether. Read that Miller-McCune research essay here.

Mosley's 'Last Days' Restores Memory, But At A Cost from NPR Podcast Fresh Air

Walter Mosley is the author of more than three dozen novels, including many mysteries featuring the L.A. detective Easy Rawlins. His latest novel, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, is about a 91-year-old black man entering the early stages of dementia and the last years of his life. But Grey's life changes after he meets a 17-year-old teenager named Robyn, without a family of her own. Robyn cares for Ptolemy and introduces him to a local doctor, who invites him to join an experimental drug study that will help bring back his memory — but will simultaneously also shorten his life span. And Ptolemy must decide what to do.

Read the full NPR feature story here. Download the Fresh Air podcast here. Also, the LA Times had this to say about the novel:

In "The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey," Mosley returns to contemporary Los Angeles with a daring, beautifully wrought story that incorporates elements of allegory, meditative reflection and the lilt of lyric tragedy. For obvious reasons, we can never know the confusion and loss of intellectual faculties that so often attend old age, but in this novel Mosley gives as convincing an evocation as you're likely to encounter in literature. The result is an unexpectedly profound novel of the subtle links between memory and identity, of the difference between forgetting and having the past stripped from you, of what it may mean to be lost, first to those around you, then to yourself. Mosley's unlikely protagonist is Ptolemy Grey, a 91-year-old African American living as a near-recluse in a filthy, rented apartment in one of South L.A.'s meaner neighborhoods. His flat is cluttered with trash and the material fragments of a life dissolving in dementia. Ptolemy's beloved second wife, Sensia, is decades dead; roaches patrol his kitchen counters; his bathroom hasn't worked for years and he sleeps under a table in the living room, perhaps because his bedroom is stuffed with a pack rat's junk, perhaps for darker reasons. Even he is no longer quite sure. His real companions are a classical music radio station and an all-news television channel that he keeps on simultaneously, day and night.

See also: Known to Evil (A Leonid McGill Mystery), The Long Fall, The Long Fall: The First Leonid McGill Mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

'Other People': A Family Portrait Of Depression from NPR by HELLER MCALPIN

"Every family has a secret and the secret is that it's not like other families," Alan Bennett writes in A Life Like Other People's. This family memoir, extracted from his 2006 autobiographical volume, Untold Stories, is at once a touching portrait of his parents, "the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple," and a sobering tale of depression and dementia.

You can find a lengthy excerpt of the book at NPR.org. See also: The Uncommon Reader: A Novella, Untold Stories, Writing Home, The Complete Talking Heads