Rating: 
Summary: But What Do The Kids See?
Review: Adults look at Eminem, or Britney Spears, or Doom, and see horrific anti-social media that might corrupt their children.In this interesting and well-written book, Gerard Jones points out that children see something entirely different. Especially where children are not merely passive consumers, fantasy media, including violent shows and video games, are a tool that children use to very important ends -- learning to distinguish fantasy from reality, learning to organize reality, learning to overcome powerlessness and how to act when they are no longer powerless. Jones does not champion laissez-faire parenting and the surrendering of your child to Hulk Hogan and the Spice Girls. Throughout, he suggests an active, empathetic approach to your child's media consumption. The book is thought-provoking and a much-needed counterbalance to a great deal of hysteria.
Rating:
Summary: Check those PC reflexes!
Review: Ah, I love a good dust-up on Amazon.com. This is one of those books that makes people think--and many people, obviously, don't want us to think. I note that each of the one-star reviews below consists of personal attacks on the author (what we used to call "ad hominem" back when people knew Latin words). Not one of them actually critiques what the book itself says. This has traditionally been considered the lowest form of argument, but it's usually enough for the Politically Correct who'd rather shut others up than have to think. And most of those attacks, of course, are quite unsupported by the book or what we can read about the author. "He doesn't care about kids," we're told, and yet the book is built largely around his personal work with kids. "He doesn't talk about family instability!" But he does. "He doesn't talk about advertising." But he does, at least a bit. "He's only justifying the entertainment industry." Yet he tells parents to turn off the TV in Chapter 2. The author is "advancing a political agenda," we're told, though we aren't told what that agenda might be. Gosh, perhaps if there WERE a political agenda in this book you might be able to tell us what it is. I won't even get into whether I "agree" with the book or not. This is one of those rare books that shakes up preconceptions and flushes the anti-thought PCers out of the woodwork, and I say more power to it!
Rating:
Summary: A startlingly clear new view of an eternal subject
Review: Although written through the lens of a "parenting" novel (and useful as such), this is also a riveting analysis of why we have always loved violent stories, why our appetite for intense entertainment violence has increased in recent times, and why we are, at the same time, alarmed and disturbed by the very images that fascinate us. The history of the entertainment industry's often conflictive relationship with our higher cultural aspirations is as compelling as any of the anecdotes about young people culled from the author's experience. This is a book that should send thought and research in a dozen new directions.
Rating: 
Summary: Jouer le jeu
Review: Après les diatribes publiques contre Eminem, les jeux vidéo, et la sexualité exacerbée des vedettes pop, Killing Monsters arrive comme un baume. En nous disant que nous ne sommes pas fous de penser que l'on crie facilement Haro sur le baudet!, il replace le discours parfois hystérique de l'impact de la violence en faisant le point sur l'état de la question d'une manière fort accessible. Jones est bon vulgarisateur et il s'appuie sur des ateliers qu'il a menés auprès d'enfants d'âge scolaire pour nous livrer son principal message : les enfants jouent; arrêtons de poser nos grilles d'analyse restrictives sur quelque chose d'aussi sain que le jeu. L'essayiste a donc le mérite de poser de bonnes questions, même si parfois il donne l'impression d'offrir toujours la même réponse. De fait, le livre s'adresse davantage aux parents qu'aux chercheurs et cette visée d'un public non spécialisé peut expliquer la redondance du message et la portion "Quoi faire avec mon jeune?" à la fin de l'essai... Les chapitres ont souvent la même structure : à partir du cas d'un enfant X, à propos duquel les parents s'inquiètent, Jones expose une nouvelle façon d'aborder le problème, analysant judicieusement tour à tour Barbie, le phénomène Pokémon, les jeux vidéo sanglants et les films genre Natural Born Killers. Les jeux sont violents? C'est peut-être le moyen qu'ont les enfants de gérer leur frustration ou d'essayer de comprendre la violence elle-même. La violence fictionnelle désensibilise les enfants? La désensibilisation n'est peut-être pas toujours néfaste. Veut-on que nos enfants figent devant le danger? Qu'ils ne soient pas préparés à aider une personne en détresse? Être trop sensible à la violence, nous dit Gerard Jones, ne s'avèrerait peut-être pas une meilleure alternative.
Rating:
Summary: About time!
Review: As a 27-year-old male who grew up on Star Wars and He-Man and spent a decent part of his teenage years playing Street Fighter, I felt that this book was (finally) telling my story, as I never could have for myself, especially at that age. It's very anecdotal and brings in a lot of voices to describe experiences that we've rarely been able to hear in all the arguing over statistics. Maybe this isn't everyone's experience of "violent entertainment," but it certainly was mine--and I think a lot of other guys' too. Very worth reading if you want to hear the "consumer's" story instead of just the usual critics and industry flaks.
Rating:
Summary: Makes the positives, negatives, and possibles clear!
Review: As a drama teacher who works with a lot of urban and low-income young people, this book really helped me understand why they're drawn tothe kinds of stories they are, where it works well and where it can go wrong, and how to get positively involved in their imaginations. Recommended to anyone who works with kids!
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating look at kids, violence and fantasy
Review: As a forensic psychologist who specializes in youth violence, I found "Killing Monsters" a must for anyone in the mental health field. It gives a different perspective on how kids use violence to ward off feelings of powerlessness--one of the main causes of kids becoming violent in the first place. In a society that expells kids for drawing pictures of guns or writing violent essays, Mr. Jones is a lone voice in the quest for rational thought on the topic of media violence and its impact on youth. The book is fabulous and well worth the purchase price!
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking -- a must read for all parents
Review: As a parent of two young boys, this was one of the most important parenting book I've read. Even beyond that, it really helped me put a lot of what we're all force fed by the media into some helpful perspective (yes, you can form your own opinions and not feel bad about being politically incorrect).
Rating:
Summary: This book changed my mind.
Review: 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:
Summary: Now I get it!
Review: As the parent to a 5 year old boy, I was drawn to this book to try to make sense of my own son's behavior. Why, if he loves Jurassic Park and Star Wars and making gun noises while pointing a stick, is he such a nonviolent, sweet-natured kid? Sure, he loves to roughhouse playfully, but he loved to do that before he watched anything other than the Baby Einstein series and Sesame Street videos: he's a child with a high need for touch and movement. I had begun reading books like The Plug In Drug (horribly histrionic and based on junk science) and reading original research on Pubmed about TV violence, and the whole "media violence makes kids violent" argument was rapidly unraveling for me.
I expected to be challenged by this book and was delighted to see how very smart it is. The author puts forth a well-reasoned, nuanced argument about how children-not adults, but children themselves-experience fantasy violence on a psychological level. It provides a safe way for them to explore feelings of fear, powerlessness, and anger. I love, too, that he talks about girls and girl heroines.
The authors' personal experiences were SO reminiscent of mine and my husband's, right down to the way his sons' friends, male and female, love to play monster, that it just kept ringing bells for me. My son's friends are all drawn to both "good guys" (how many Spiderman birthday parties have we been to this year?) and scary guys (my son, like me as a child, is utterly fascinated by The Hulk), and quick to leave the room when a "too scary" scene comes up in a movie. They're also, across the board, nice, friendly kids who readily hug each other, comfort each other, and share their toys and adventures with each other as well as with the new kids who show up in the neighborhood. Now, after reading this book, how these kids behave makes so much more sense to me. And I'm finally getting why so many pacifists I know have fond memories of playing cowboys and Indians.
|
