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Title: Killing Monsters Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones, Lynn, Md. Ponton ISBN: 0-465-03696-1 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.14 (36 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: This book changed my mind.
Comment: As a psychotherapist and medical school professor, I speak regularly with parents who worry about their kids' taste in entertainment. I have commiserated with them often. After all, weren't the Columbine shooters obsessed with "Doom" and similar fare? Don't images create possibilities? Gerard Jones argues against the prevailing belief that fantasy violence makes kids violent. Close study of the literature shows that teens who watch the most violent entertainment actually commit fewer serious crimes. And among the 18 boys who perpetrated school rampages in recent years, the majority showed no interest in games. Instead of asking the unanswerable: "How does violent entertainment affect kids?" Jones poses 2 more interesting questions: Why do they love what they love? and: What is the place of fantasy violence in a world that condemns it in reality? He uses his teaching experiences and 30 years of social science research to show how children use make believe to master fears and experiment with feeling strong. In "Girl Power" Jones contends that just as girls used to identify with male fantasy figures, boys are now identifying with Lara Croft and other super-heroines. In a culture in which the male imaginary has been standard--something to which girls and women needed to accomodate--this expanding set of possibilities for kids is no small triumph. While the book is targeted to parents, it's also a solid piece of scholarship, and the author is obviously as comfortable with Freud and Bettelheim as he is Batman and Mega Zords. A fine cultural critique informs his argument. ("We don't ask whether game shows predispose our children to greed or love songs to bad relationships." "Killing MOnsters" made me think of James Joyce's hearing the word "imagination" as "the magic nation" (in "Finnegan's Wake.") Gerard Jones reminds us that we're all permanent citizens of that vast and weird republic, sometimes for worse, but much more often for better.
Rating: 4
Summary: Not what I expected (but better for that)
Comment: To be honest, I thought this would be more of a polemic about the value of entertainment (which would have been interesting), but in fact it's a very heartfelt and practical book, full of interesting and touching stories about the author, his child, and the children he's worked with. There are doses of psychological research and media analysis as well, of course (along with some very interesting historical tidbits), but I was especially impressed at the way it speaks to parents and teachers working with children on a daily basis and feeling concern for their involvement with media. It's also very thorough, with specific chapters on children's toy gun play; play fighting; girls's fantasy and media tastes; power fantasies in puberty; violent media and the underparented child; the conventional research on the media; 'shooter' video games; the importance of bad taste; the separation of fantasy and reality; suggestions for talking with children; and so on.
I've put 'Killing Monsters' on my shelf beside such other helpful books as Joanne Cantor's 'Mommy I'm Scared' and William Pollak's 'Real Boys Workbook.'
Rating: 2
Summary: only half right
Comment: This book makes a valid point that children do need to connect somehow with those angry, violent, hateful feelings that we all have inside of us. However, the authors acknowledge (near the end of the book) that when children get stuck in fantasies of violence they really do not have a way of growing beyond them. When media violence does not offer children (and adults as well) a way to move past the violent feelings and fantasies that grip them, they do no one a service. That is why the glut of violence in children's media is a problem. Instead of using this book to justify past creative endeavors in the comic book world, the authors would have done better to explore ways of storytelling that would actually help children grow beyond those violent feelings. This book is only half right, and the authors left out the rest of the story... what a child needs after connecting with the painful, disturbing, angry feelings and fantasies.
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Title: What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee ISBN: 1403961697 Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Pub. Date: 16 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
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Title: Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence by Dave Grossman, Gloria Degaetano ISBN: 0609606131 Publisher: Crown Publishers Pub. Date: 01 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Video Game Theory Reader by Mark J. P. Wolf, Bernard Perron ISBN: 0415965799 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: The Other Parent: The Inside Story of the Media's Effect on Our Children by James P. Steyer, Chelsea Clinton ISBN: 0743405838 Publisher: Atria Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: "Mommy, I'm Scared": How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them by Joanne Cantor ISBN: 0156005921 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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