A compelling corporate saga mired in mythmaking.
A chronicle of the rise and fall of TSR, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons.
With a trove of research and candid interviews, Riggs investigates the many missteps that would ultimately sour “years of stunning success” for the tabletop gaming giant. This debut book follows the creation of D&D by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the incorporation of TSR, and Gygax’s eventual ousting from the company in 1985 due to slippery shareholder politics. The new CEO, Lorraine Williams, was more of a businesswoman than a gamer. Amid declining sales of kits and rulebooks, Williams sought success elsewhere in the market, overseeing the production of breakout fantasy novels and ill-fated gimmicks like VHS–integrated board games. TSR failed to retain its staff and took for granted the artists and writers who contributed to its occasional victories. Eventually, a shifty distribution contract with Random House left a “pile of debt…[that] threatened to bury TSR,” which ultimately led to the company’s 1997 acquisition by rivals Wizards of the Coast. TSR’s story is inherently compelling, but Riggs ceaselessly attempts to conjure additional lore from the company’s history. He exalts Gygax, referring to him as “Saint Gary” numerous times, and descriptions of the old TSR offices repeat ad nauseam throughout the text as the author tries to transform the spaces into hallowed grounds. Like his description of Gygax’s prose, Riggs is often “labyrinthine and bombastic,” hailing many creators as geniuses and Einsteins of their field. Many sections are riddled with rhetorical questions and quickly answered. “Was this the end?” Riggs asks in an early chapter. This indirect, undercooked storytelling will frustrate many readers. Riggs is certainly a passionate raconteur, but one can easily imagine a better tale without the unnecessary embellishments. Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards and David Ewalt’s Of Dice and Men are good choices for veteran gamers, but it seems the definitive history of D&D has yet to be written.
A compelling corporate saga mired in mythmaking.Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27804-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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