A fascinating, appealingly written history of an iconic American amusement.
In her debut, New York Times sports reporter Pilon deftly explores the origin of the Monopoly board game.
For as much enjoyment and strategic suspense as the game inspires in its players, the author reports on its flip side: Monopoly’s problematic, serpentine roots. Inventor Lizzie Magie, an outspoken Washington, D.C., stenographer and activist, based her “Landlord’s Game” on personal progressive political views and those of 19th-century politician, economist and “magnetic leader” Henry George and his radical “single tax theory.” Yet, as the author notes, Magie’s name would soon become disassociated from the game. Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, would eventually take credit for Monopoly’s creation with his own controversial appropriation of the game and, with its blockbuster success, rescue a near-bankrupt Parker Brothers Company. Pilon also explores the work of competitive Parker rival Milton Bradley, and she looks at later appropriations of Monopoly in the early 1930s. It’s certainly surprising how Darrow and Parker Brothers were able to receive a patent for Monopoly “given the two Landlord’s Game patents that had come before it.” Sketchier still were Parker Brothers swift payoffs to creators of pre-Darrow Monopoly game incarnations (including Magie). However, the intrigue and litigious melodramatics hardly end there, as more questions on the authenticity of Parker’s version of the game continued to surface. Pilon invests this surprisingly contentious chronicle with a dynamic mix of journalistic knowledge and subtle wit, adding a compelling chapter on a San Francisco economics professor’s invention of the “Anti-Monopoly Game,” which drew the ire of Parker Brothers and incited even more antagonistic trademark-infringement lawsuits. Contemporary gamers interested in exploring the early genesis of their pastime will find Pilon to be a readable, entertaining tour guide.
A fascinating, appealingly written history of an iconic American amusement.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60819-963-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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