Did Chess Make Him Crazy?

Bobby Fischer is back in Iceland, and that is as it should be. Fischer put Iceland on the map for the first time since the Vikings happened by. And Iceland put Fischer on the map, providing the venue for his greatest triumph, the 1972 world chess championship. That was before he fell off a psychic cliff.

Three decades later, the fugitive ex-champion, sought by U.S. authorities for violating U.N. sanctions on Yugoslavia (in 1992 he played a high-profile rematch with Boris Spassky in Belgrade), is whisked out of a Japanese jail where he was awaiting extradition and offered...