Rating: 
Summary: Avoid this book if you think like I do!
Review: The culture of violence has created the dominant narrative for western peoples since the Greeks. As the Greeks stole their legends from the Phoenicians, so too has Gerard Jones borrowed his own lessons from the impacted and misogynistic bowels of Hollywood. As if woman-objectifying films stressing the size of the bosom or the slimness of the waist weren't enough, Jones has to overlook decades of psychological research and postmodern analysis to find anything redeeming about violent play.Rather than avoid the gender specific wares of toystores and television, with their pink aisles and violent robot warriors, Jones sincerely hopes to convince his readers that machismo and male-dominated play are in fact normal. Far be it from me to suggest that swords, guns, superheroes, and video games are a symptom of the woman-repressing culture of violence. Jones thinks that life-affirming, nurturant activities that help children to actualize their need for empathy should be replaced by bullets, ghouls, and gore. Methinks Jones has a few too many monsters in his own closet. Aside from the author's own violent and repressive personality, which you can see in spades from his numerous anecdotes of his childhood and his (shocking!) adventures as a parent, we are left with the text itself. Killing Monsters, as the raw and disturbingly machismo title suggests, contributes nothing new to our collective narrative. It may help generate funding for another blockbuster festival of gruesome man-worshipping, some new orgy of pain in the cinema, but it has little value not already offered by such grim rot as Macbeth or Agamemnon. What can be said about the sordid state of western culture that wasn't said 2000 years ago? To top off this wretched and bilious text, Jones has the audacity to urge us to join our children in their forays into the dominant paradigm of violence and hatred. We are urged to help them slay dragons and learn to control their fears. Are we to sincerely believe that children are best raised outside the village? That warmth and nurturance are not food enough for their hungry souls? Should we ignore the crisis of unsustainable growth caused by the very adventurism, carnivory, and unbounded spirits advocated by Jones? I think not. This book is an abomination. It raises filth and gore to the heights of human endeavor, and leaves moral teaching and the proper virtues that all humans should share aside. Can we ignore that superheroes come with spandex-clad superheroines? Should we immerse our kids in sexed-up play? Will we let them indulge in ritualistic horrors like dungeons and dragons, magic, or online fantasy gaming? I think not. Jones may have not problem abandoning his duties as a moral and upstanding father. Leaving his fair and innocent children by the side of the road, to be picked up by the first moral degenerate to offer them a ride. I am glad that for the sake of his children, there are others among us willing to take up the duties of the village, and guide these children to what is proper, bright, soft, and moral. As I said, you will avoid reading this dreadful book if your thinking is anything like mine.
Rating: 
Summary: The book I've been waiting for as a parent!
Review: The first reviewer oversimplified this book terribly! In fact, Jones discusses thoroughly when and how media can be a problem in kids' lives and what we can REALLY do about it as parents and a society. He also reveals the many lessons, good and bad, that violent entertainment can carry. But most important, he explains WHY children love this kind of entertainment and what they can gain from it! Having seen my own children's violent play, fantasies and tastes, and having heard nothing but judgment and anxiety-provoking studies from "experts," this is the book I wanted--and didn't even know it! The anecdotes are fascinating and very convincing, and the arguments are clear and exciting. Suddenly I have a whole picture to make sense of this needlessly confusing debate. No one should talk about violent entertainment ever again without reading this book first!
Rating: 
Summary: Real kids
Review: The kids I know, either running around my house or making karate chops on the school yard, jump from the pages of this book. I got the feeling that Jones really understands how kids think and feel. I picked up some pointers about new ways to talk to my kids about violent feelings, plus I got a head start on the world of violent video games. Other than that, this book was easy to read, full of research to back up his point, and kept me interested with some vivid stories.
Rating:
Summary: Cynical, Profiteering Fraud
Review: This book is a cynical, profiteering fraud. Here's why. Basic Books, its publisher, is owned by the merchant banker, Perseus LLC.
Perseus' other holdings include substantial interests in developing and selling biometric software. (The software that allows governments to recognize people via their body parts - retinal scans, face recognition, fingerprinting etc.)
Since 911, this software has become the darling of the White House in its "fight" against terror. There's billions of dollars sloshing around the Capitol in the guise of research funding for "defense" technologies to keep the nation safe. Perseus wants to suck up whatever it can get.
Perseus is also a self-declared "partner" with General Electric, a huge player in the weapons and defense market and owner of NBC and its associated businesses. In 2003, NBC merged with Vivendi Universal, a manufacturer of some of the sickest, most vicious and violent video games imaginable. So, GE owns Vivendi and is partner with Perseus. Hold that thought.
Violent video games have, for decades, been used to condition US military personnel to feel good about killing other human beings. This process is called Operant Conditioning. (During World War II, barely 15 percent of soldiers fired on fired back. The other 85 percent were too concerned about hurting their enemy. Post Operant Conditioning, 95 percent of military fired on have fired back.)
This conditioning has for years been, as a matter of public policy, extended beyond the military recruiters' richest annual harvest: male youths, often non-white, from low socio-economic environments. Pre-hardening these young people via the self-conditioning inherent in playing violent video games, (see Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence by Dave Grossman, Gloria Degaetano) saves the military a lot of time and effort when it comes to boot camp. In short: US Military+GE+Vivendi+Basic Books+Jones = More efficient killers.
The myriad studies proving that media violence causes real violence among children are an enormous handicap to the money-making potential of Basic Books, Perseus, General Electric, NBC, Vivendi and the US military. So they have manufactured a "counter culture," "grassroots" movement advocating the "benefits" of young people consuming violent media.
Author Gerard Jones is a very public shill for this "movement."
The weakness of Jones' arguments/blather, the manipulation of the "research" findings that he quotes, the suspicious number of highly germane and illustrative and unverifiable anecdotal "proofs" the he offers, his own vested interest in increasing the market for violent media and his snake-oil salesmanship of his own miracle tonic are obvious enough in his book. (Obvious to all who think beyond wanting an excuse to give in to the pervasive culture of violence that children must negotiate their humanity with every day. Maybe not so obvious for those who cannot or choose not to think any deeper than that.)
What isn't obvious is the motive behind, not just Jones' book, but the growing, manufactured license that those who are charged with protecting children are being given by profit-making enterprises to turn their charges over to market and military forces. (We live in a culture in which living with your parents beyond the age of 18 is considered shameful, but "joining up" and flying halfway across the world to murder innocent people is considered honorable.)
Killing Monsters is as inane as it is reprehensible. Buying into its message demands a moronic, mindless and dangerous selling out to those who make money from committing violence against, facilitating violence towards and instilling violence in our children.
Rating:
Summary: Not the right place for politics
Review: This book is another attempt to politicize issues related to kids. Any evidence suggested in here is based on the authors' views; that, or he has found a very few "educators" and "experts" who regurgitate his words. It is abundantly apparent that the book was NOT written with the best interests of children in mind...rather, it was intended to further the authors' political viewpoint.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: This book is highly recommended, even more so if you have anything to do with kids. This book does a superb job of explaining things that many of have may have thought and felt, not just to violence, but the general world of kids today. Many of my personal experiences are anecdotal, but they certainly match up with what the author writes and appear contrary to many of the "solutions" that the media and many ivory-tower wannabees present to us. Every time I hear some new (distorted) statistic, I think "that can't be right". This book gives some insight to why that is. Much of this may not be a total surprise to you, you might have been thinking this way already, but to see it laid out plain and convincing gives a lot of enjoyment. Invest a couple hours, even if only the first chapter -- do it for the kids ... and yourself.
Rating: 
Summary: only half right
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected (but better for that)
Review: 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:
Summary: Great book for people interested in defending media violence
Review: Well, I'm a 14 year old girl- not exactly the target object for this book, but it was very interesting, and it provided a great defence for when this comes up in discussions in my family and in class discussion groups. In a day when media violence is being critisized in just about everything, and yet it is very prominent, it's good to see information that my friends, almost all of whom are gamers, are not going to take a gun and shoot up my entire school.
Rating:
Summary: Great book for people interested in defending media violence
Review: Well, I'm a girl- not exactly the target object for this book, but it was very interesting, and it provided a great defence for when this comes up in discussions in my family and in class discussion groups. In a day when media violence is being critisized in just about everything, and yet it is very prominent, it's good to see information that my friends, almost all of whom are gamers, are not going to take a gun and shoot up my entire school.
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