Ready to Hazard: A Biography of Commodore William Bainbridge, Seventeen Seventy-Two to Eight... Book

Kubrick was a poor Jewish kid from the Bronx, not educated beyond high school (his grades throughout were terrible), who ended up an expatriated autodidactic cinematic genius. Also, he was a master-level chess player (his dad both taught him chess and bought him his first camera around the age of twelve) who hustled games in Central Park for extra money as a teenager. I still love to imagine the epic matches that may have taken place at the Nabokov/Kubrick meetings during the film adaptation of Lolita (Kubrick was known to always have a chess set at hand and take all comers). To be a fly on the wall at the meeting of those two minds over the field of battle!