Smart reportage with enough drama to appeal beyond the gaming community.
An account of a late-’80s patent suit that shaped today’s video-game industry.
Veteran journalist Parkin (The Island of Extraordinary Captives, 2022, etc.) centers his story on Nintendo of America Inc. v. Magnavox Co., a 1988 suit that, on the surface, seems too dry and fussy for book-length treatment. Magnavox, a TV manufacturer that launched an ill-fated venture into home video gaming in the ’70s with its Odyssey system, held patents that, it argued, gave it rights over any screen-based games; Nintendo, preparing to enter the U.S. market with its NES system, argued those patents were untenably broad. The companies ultimately settled, but, from that anticlimax, Parkin unspools an engaging tale of the early days of gaming. The story encompasses Spacewar, a simple shooting game developed by MIT students in the early ’60s; Ralph Baer, a German expat engineer who developed television games while working at a defense contractor; Atari, which pioneered arcade and home video games with Pong; and authors like Stewart Brand and Ellen Kuhfeld, whose magazine articles introduced gaming to the mainstream (and served as valuable exhibits in the Magnavox case). Smartly, Parkin highlights personalities as much as legal processes, finding an engaging protagonist in John Kirby, who represented Nintendo in the case; his legal savvy helped persuade the court that Magnavox’s patent claim was shaky. (By way of thanks, Nintendo named one of its popular game characters Kirby.) Details of the settlement are undisclosed, but Parkin is a determined sleuth, using court records, interviews, and well-educated guesses that show how the squabble led to a gaming culture that is now more lucrative and wide-open.
Smart reportage with enough drama to appeal beyond the gaming community.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2027
ISBN: 9781668079027
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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