Download Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players AudioBook Free
Stefan Fatsis, a previous Wall Avenue Journal reporter and Country wide Consumer Radio regular, recounts his impressive rise through the ranks of top notch Scrabble players while checking out the game's peculiar, potent hold over them - and him. Scrabble might truly be called America's game. More than two million pieces are sold each year with least thirty million American homes have one. However the game's most gifted competitors inhabit a sphere much taken off the people of "living room players." Theirs is a amazingly diverse subculture whose personalities add a vitamin-popping standup comic; a previous lender teller whose intestinal troubles earn him the nickname "G.I. Joel"; a burly, unemployed African American from Baltimore's inner city; the three-time national champion who performs regarding to Zen concepts; and Fatsis himself, who we see altered from a wondering reporter to a validated Scrabble nut. He starts by haunting the gritty corner of the Greenwich Village playground where pickup Scrabble games are available whenever weather enables. His curiosity soon morphs into compulsion, as he packages about memorizing a large number of obscure words and fills his evenings with single Scrabble played out on his living room floor. In a short time he discovers himself at competitions socializing - and contending - with Scrabble's top notch. But this reserve is approximately more than hardcore Scrabblers, for the game produces insights into realms as disparate as linguistics, psychology, and mathematics. Expression Freak stretches its reach even further, pondering the light Scrabble throws on such notions as brilliance, recollection, competition, failing, and hope. It is a geography of obsession that celebrates the uncanny powers locked in every folks. This edition includes a new 2013 afterword by the author.
