An illuminating book that both introduces and critiques an often overlooked art form.
A nonfiction work explores society and culture through the lens of tabletop games.
Board games have undergone a resurgence in recent years—perhaps partly, debut author Moriarity argues, as a rejection of the ubiquity of digital entertainment—but they have been with us for centuries. They often replicate some aspect of real life: war, wealth accumulation, resource management. In this way, they provide an intriguing mirror of the society in which they are created. “This is not a book of strategy tips or game reviews,” writes Moriarity at the beginning of this volume. “It is about the things games can teach us about ourselves. Each chapter focuses on one or two game titles…and draws out a revealed lesson in history, psychology, philosophy, society or culture.” Moriarity, a gamer-turned-writer, and Kay (Among the Truthers, 2017, etc.), a writer-turned-gamer, take turns, chapter by chapter, pulling at those threads that they find most interesting. Kay uses Settlers of Catan—the first European title to become highly popular in the United States—to examine how European board games in the postwar years tended to focus on peaceful, creative themes in contrast to the conflict- and competition-driven American ones like Risk. Moriarity reveals how The Game of Life—the 1960 reimagining of Milton Bradley’s original 1860 game The Checkered Game of Life—dispensed with its predecessor’s concept of moral choice and replaced it with a deterministic quest to gain material wealth. In addition to providing a window into society, games offer players an opportunity to learn (sometimes unwittingly) about other segments of society. Kay discovers how two games—Greenland and 1812: The Invasion of Canada—made him think about and even identify with different cultures. Moriarity (in a chapter called “Horrible People”) confronts her prejudices about the sort of people who love Cards Against Humanity. Kay and Moriarity are both skilled writers and elucidators, and their voices are distinct enough to provide the book with a pleasing yin and yang. Their dueling chapters on Monopoly skillfully illustrate their various interests. Kay comments on how the game’s poor-get-poorer, rich-get-richer mechanic is “characteristic of a certain dynamic observed in nature, engineering, and human relationships, one that mathematicians sometimes describe as unstable equilibrium.” Moriarity, meanwhile, focuses on the psychological benefits—and worsened gameplay—of the popular but noncanonical Stupid Free Parking Rule: “I am using the word ‘rule’ in the loosest possible sense because there is, in fact, no such rule—which is a big part of the problem.” The authors include a mix of classic titles that most readers will know (Scattergories, Scrabble, Dungeons & Dragons), with more-complex offerings from the tabletop world (Pandemic, Dead of Winter, Legend of the Five Rings). It’s a far more perceptive and intriguing book than it appears at first blush, particularly for those readers who have never thought of games as an artistic medium—at least not one that comments on society. Regular gamers will enjoy these takes on familiar titles. And readers just discovering the tabletop renaissance will likely want to play some of these games themselves.
An illuminating book that both introduces and critiques an often overlooked art form.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9994395-4-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Sutherland House
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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