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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
