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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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