Well-researched but with limited appeal.
A gaming enthusiast pays homage to Gary Gygax (1938-2008), the creator of the swords-and-sorcery role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Chicago native Gygax acquired his taste for fantasy from a father who regaled him with bedtime stories of “giants and dragons [and] wise old wizards with magic rings.” As he grew up, he indulged his escapist daydreams by reading pulp science fiction and fantasy magazines like Weird Tales while cultivating a passion for war games and chess. By the time he married and began his adult life, Gygax was spending so many of his evenings gaming with other locals that his wife suspected he was having an affair. In 1968, he helped organize the first war-games convention in Lake Geneva (called Gen Con for short) and started to develop games based on fantasy themes that used elaborate table settings, multisided dice, and miniatures. In 1973, Gygax formed a partnership with his closest gaming friends called Tactical Studies Rules and published the first 1,000 copies of the game he would call Dungeons & Dragons a year later. D&D grew rapidly in popularity during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. Yet its successes, which included cartoons and a (aborted) movie deal, were tainted by internal problems within TSR—e.g., lawsuits brought against Gygax by former partners and Gygax’s own financial mismanagement. The D&D creator would eventually go on to found other small gaming companies, develop other games, and even write pulp sci-fi–style novels. By the early 2000s, he had become a beloved popular-culture icon, and Sync magazine “named Gary as number one on its list of the ‘50 Biggest Nerds of All Time.’ ” Witwer’s respect for Gygax is evident throughout, but while his overview of D&D's influence on popular culture is informative, this book will likely find its strongest readership only among fellow gaming aficionados.
Well-researched but with limited appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-279-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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