Title: Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
Author: Blake J. Harris
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Year: 2014
Publisher: It Books
Acquired: From the publisher for review consideration
Rating:

Review: I’m not much of a gamer, but I have a soft spot for books about video games (see: Extra Lives by Tom Bissell), especially books that help explain gamer culture or the business behind how the video game industry actually works. When Console Wars — a chunkster of a book about the rise of video games in the early 1990s — arrived on my doorstep, I started reading it immediately.

As the subtitle indicates, the book traces the “battle” between Nintendo, the undisputed king of video games, and Sega, the quirky underdog trying to make it in America, during Tom Kalinske’s tenure as Sega of America CEO. Kalinske was hired by Hayao Nakayama, president of Sega Enterprises, in 1990 specifically to make SOA competitive with Nintendo which, at that time, had nearly all of the market in the video game industry.

Over the six years of his tenure as head of SOA, Kalinske used a series of aggressive marketing and business tactics to challenge Nintendo. Kalinske and his team were also  instrumental in developing Sonic the Hedgehog as we know him today. One of my favorite details in the book is that the original Japanese version was “villainous and crude, complete with sharp fangs, a spiked collar, an electric guitar and a human girlfriend whose cleavage made Barbie’s chest look flat.” Hilarious!

Author Blake J. Harris tells a great story, full of conflict and characters with strong opinions. Because the book relies on a strong narrative and these characters, Harris pushes against the limits of what I’m usually comfortable with in nonfiction. In his author’s note he mentions altering, reconstructing or imagining details of settings and descriptions and re-creating dialogue based on how sources recounted it. Those fudges with fact make an absorbing, entertaining read, but do make the edges of the book feel a little bit blurry, like those Dateline crime scene reconstructions feel — they’re not necessarily untrue, but they’re not entirely accurate either.

That all said, I’m spending longer commenting on this than I spent feeling weird about it while I read. Harris put together a great story and I feel confident that the interesting facts — how SOA developed Sonic or how the two companies reacted to the violence in Mortal Combat — are true enough to bear repeating. And I think if Harris hadn’t taken some liberties to reconstruct parts of this story, the book would have been too much of a business book for an average reader to enjoy. Reading the book with the boyfriend, who remembered his first video game systems and some of the marketing tactics mentioned in the book, was also really fun — I’m so curious what people who grew up with video games will think about this story.

If you curious about the history of video games, then Console Wars is worth getting your hands on. But if you don’t think you have the time for 576 pages on the early ’90s world of Sega and Nintendo, you can probably wait for the documentary or feature film.

Other Reviews:

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

Today is my sixth blogiversary! I launched this blog on May 10, 2008, just a few days before my college graduation. I was trying to leave the world of angsty, college girl blogging behind and because I was an English major, I figured a blog about books was the best fit for me.

Six years later I know that book people are my people and that writing about books is my passion. To mark this blog’s entry into first grade, here are six things I’m grateful for after six years of book blogging.

1. I’ve made amazing friends.

Before I started blogging, I was, I think, skeptical about the idea that you could make real, true friends online. Six years later some of the strongest friendships I have are with people I would never have met without this blog. Whenever I get to meet fellow bloggers in person, it amazes me how easily we can just jump into a conversation because we’ve already been talking for years.

2. I’ve traveled to cities I’d be too nervous to visit myself.

Deep down, I’m pretty shy and I’m terrified of traveling. But because of this blog, I’ve been to New York and Los Angeles — two cities I would never have gone otherwise. I traveled to those cities by myself and I survived. That’s huge.

3. I’ve read hundreds of great books.

I love to read and I love to be a reader, but I know that I’ve read more books – and better books – because of this blog. I read more because of other readers and, to be honest, because of the pressure to have content for this blog. While sometimes that is draining, most of the time I love it.

4. I’ve learned the ins and outs of owning a small business and working as a freelance writer.

Since I switched to a self-hosted blog in, I think, 2009, I’ve had to quickly learn all sorts of skills I didn’t know I needed. This blog has become a (very) small business, and I’ve learned how to run it. If I ever jump ship from this newspaper thing and decide to go freelance, this blog will have helped me get there.

5. I’ve stretched my reading and personal horizons.

I used to be a pretty big book snob (just as my sister, she can attest to that). Thanks to the support and push from other readers, I’ve coming more accepting of other genres and the books that other people love. I’ve also tried all sorts of new forms of books, audio books and graphic novels in particular, that I’m not sure I would have tried otherwise.

6. I’ve found my voice.

Thanks to this blog, I’m a contributor to a couple of different websites and do some freelance book reviews for a newspaper. I have a voice in my reviews and a voice as a critic that this blog has helped me develop. The fact that I continue to have readers here who value my opinion enough to read my posts surprises me a little bit every day.

This blog has evolved since I put up my first post, and I’m glad for that. Blogs have to grow with you, and this blog has seen me through an amazingly varied and challenging and wonderful section of my life. I’m so thankful and grateful to all of you who continue to read and make this space something special. Now go read a book!

| Blogiversary 1 | Blogiversary 2 | Blogiversary 3| Blogiversary 4 | Blogiversary 5 |

Photo Credit: kathryn via Flickr Creative Commons

Title: The Empathy Exams: Essays
Author: Leslie Jamison
Genre: Essays
Year: 2014
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Acquired: Purchased
Rating:

Note: Portions of this post appeared at Book Riot as part of the Best Books We Read in April.

Review: I love to read personal essays, but it’s been awhile since I found a collection that knocked me back on my heels like The Empathy Exams. Because thinking about this collection makes my brain feel a little skewed, in the best possible way, I’m going to have to rely on a publisher’s summary to set the stage here:

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain — real and imagined, her own and others’ — Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory — from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration — in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Leslie Jamison’s writing is elegant and honest, and reflects a person who is profoundly curious about the world around her, especially the world of pain and suffering. One of the things that made these essays so wonderful was the way that Jamison could slip effortlessly between the personal and the academic, never making it feel like one was out of place in a single essay or in the collection as a whole.

In the first piece, “The Empathy Exams,” Jamison ties together her experiences as a medical actor and evaluating doctors on their ability to vocalize empathy while working with fake patients to her actual experience with doctors when she had abortion followed by heart surgery. The parallel experiences become part of a larger piece pondering how we demand empathy from others and the way empathy is a choice each of us actively makes when facing another person.

Jamison is also never content to choose an easy answer. Every essays weaves in and out of itself, coming at it’s central topic from several different approaches. The final essay of the collection,  “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”, does this beautifully and is, I think, the essay that really made me feel like my brain was bending in a new way. Starting with the great “wounded women” of literature, she goes on a meandering path to explore how female pain is often dismissed, how women use or reject pain in their identity, how pain is an almost inevitable part of being a woman, and how pain of any kind still demands we approach it with an open heart. It’s just remarkable.

Throughout the collection, Jamison is always interrogating herself and her conclusions in a way that made me feel like I was thinking and exploring along side her as she took a question apart and put it back together again. If you are skeptical about an essay collection, you can read versions of the first and last essays of the book (my favorites) at the links I shared above. This is a beautiful, thoughtful, smart collection that I can’t recommend highly enough.

Other Reviews:

If you have reviewed this book, please leave a link to the review in the comments and I will add your review to the main post. All I ask is for you to do the same to mine — thanks!

The Nonfiction Recommendation Engine is a semi-regular feature in which I offer personalized book recommendations based answers to a short list of questions. My real hope with the series is that other readers will jump in with recommendations in the comments, making each post a great resource for nonfiction reads. You can catch up with Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V by following those links.

Today’s first request is from Frank, and it is pretty broad:

I’m looking for popular to academic books on any of these subjects: man-made climate change, anything Minnesota, U.S. politics or labor history or U.S. military history.

This one was hard because it’s fairly specific in topics and but fairly broad in style. But here’s what I came up with for each of those subjects:

• Climate change: I’m going to suggest two books that I haven’t read, but really want to read, by Alan Weisman: The World Without Us and Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
• Minnesota: Although it is not specifically about Minnesota, I want to suggest We’ll Be the Last Ones to Let You Down by Rachael Hanel. It’s a memoir about growing up in a small Minnesota town, Waseca, and the relationship we have with death and grief. It’s wonderful.
• U.S. politics/labor history/U.S. military history: A book that, in many ways, encompasses each of these topics is The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan. This book is about the women who worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in secret during World War II to help produce the materials for the atomic bomb. None of the women knew what they were working on, and almost no one in the country even knew their city existed. It’s a great, interesting read.

The second request is from Flo at Flo and the green light:

I’m interested in writers’ memoirs. Of course, I am most interested by memoirs from writers I love/like but any writer who has something special to tell about his/her life can call my attention. The last memoir I read and enjoyed was Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie. I also enjoyed Curriculum Vitae by Muriel Spark. I’m looking for something personal (of course). I have nothing against a (light) touch of humor, but nothing too academic.

I was just working on a post for Book Riot about what I love about memoirs by writers, so responding to this request came at just the right time. I have two that I am going to suggest, both by women writers and both that have to do with illness and relationships.

The first is Truth and Beauty by Ann Patchett. This memoir is the story of Patchett’s friendship with poet Lucy Grealy, which was complicated and wonderful and sad (Grealy suffered from a variety of physical issues after a childhood illness and died of a drug overdose in 2002). In addition to their friendship, the book is also a really interesting look at the contemporary life of a working writer, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

The second is One Hundred Names for Love by Diane Ackerman. In 2006, Ackerman’s husband, novelist Paul West, had a massive stroke that damaged the language areas of his brain. This memoirs chronicles the first years after his stroke, including his daily struggles to make himself known, the challenges an illness that takes away language does to a relationship built on words, and the process of designing a new life in the wake of a condition that all but destroys what used to be. It’s a beautiful book about love and words and relationships.

Interested in getting a personalized nonfiction recommendation? Please fill out this form to get on the list. I currently have two requests in my queue, so any new requests should get answered within the next month. 

PHOTO CREDIT: CHRIS AT SHUTTERHACKS