Nonfiction Monday: Super Mario by Jeff Ryan

I'm not really a big video gamer - I like to say that video games got too advanced for me around the era of the N64. Once they stopped doing side scrolling games? I was totally lost.

But my brother is a huge gamer, so despite hardly playing a game at all, I try to keep abreast of the latest gaming news, so after seeing this Slate interview with Jeff Ryan, I thought I'd give this book a try. My family was always a Nintendo family - my parents liked Nintendo's emphasis on family-friendly games - so I've always had an affinity for Super Mario.

Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America isn't a hard hitting expose. This is no tell-all memoir of tawdry details and sordid affairs. Ryan doesn't necessarily avoid some of the less-than-awesome things Nintendo has done, but he certainly prefers to emphasize the positives of the company.

And there's a lot of positives here. Did you know Nintendo was trying to get us all into online gaming way back in the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) era? That the character of Mario was created in a company-wide contest (because the president of Nintendo didn't want to pull his "real" programmers away from other projects that were more-likely money makers. Mario, via Donkey Kong the arcade game, was a last-ditch effort to recoup losses in the US market)? That the NES Mario games were some of the first to be intentionally designed to make you want to replay them over and over to learn all their secrets?

While there's an extensive bibliography (according to the acknowledgements, there's even supposed to be "downloadable content" extra chapters at the website, but right now that appears to be only for those who preordered? Hm), this isn't a heavy academic tome with footnotes every two paragraphs. It's a serious look at a light-hearted topic, but isn't afraid to have fun, either. Video game puns abound, and the book design is whimsical - the book is divided in sections, further divided into chapters, so the chapter headings are given in familiar Mario-game parlance: 2-1, 4-8 and so on.

While the focus is definitely on Mario and Nintendo, this strikes me as a must-read for all gamers, because without Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft wouldn't be around as we know them. Nintendo was the front runner for so many years that they drove innovation in the industry. And while Nintendo has forfeited the graphics fight to the other two powerhouses, it's still driving innovation in the industry. Ryan calls the other two's attempts to get into motion-controlled gaming merely also-rans, and that Nintendo had considered those ideas first, but opted for a controller-based motion system because they felt using your whole body as a controller would require a player to basically re-learn controls for every game. If nothing else, Nintendo thinks their decisions through with painstaking detail.

This is an excellent adult non-fiction book that will appeal to anyone interested in video games. I highly enjoyed it.

Review: Warriors in the Crossfire by Nancy Bo Flood

Found via: Publisher's Weekly 4/12



There are endless variations on stories about WWII, which is a testament to just how far reaching and traumatizing that war was. While there are lots of stories about the war in Europe, and many stories about Japan, I found Warriors in the Crossfire to be a new take on the Pacific Theater, focusing on the island of Saipan, an important strategic point in the war for both the Japanese and the Americans.



For Joseph, the 13 year old son of the village chief, and his cousin and best friend Kento, the second world war is a chilling specter on the horizon - but at the same time, that horizon feels far away. Kento is the son of a native woman and a Japanese administrator, secure of his place in Saipan and sure of his safety. He wants to be both a samurai and to learn the ways of the island warriors from Joseph - just in case he needs to protect his mother and sister.

For Joseph, the skills of a warrior have a much more practical purpose. For while he is afforded some privileges, like attending the local Japanese school, he knows that the rights of his people are severely abridged. He literally has to use his hunting skills to provide enough food for his parents, his sister and her husband, and his nephew, especially as the Japanese increase their demands for workers from the native population.

As the realities of war draw closer, Joseph's father gives him a near impossible task: protect his family from the crossfire of the Japanese and American soldiers, living in a cave with limited provisions. And the hardest part? He's not to trust Kento who is, after all, Japanese. If forced to choose, who would Kento protect - his Japanese or his native family? And who would Joseph pick if faced with a similar choice?

This is a short but well-paced, action-filled book. Joseph is a well-rounded character saddled with an impossible responsibility in the face of war. I loved the look at the culture on Saipan, how it was an uneasy balance between the Japanese rulers and the various native villagers. While the war mostly takes place off screen, the ending has an absolutely chilling portrayal of the Battle of Saipan and the grim orders given to the Japanese civilians on the island.

Review: Turning Japanese by Cathy Yardley

Found via: Galley Cat

Here's one of those rare moments where I step outside of my comfort zone and read something "age appropriate" - a book for grown ups!

But don't get too excited - I bet this would have a lot of appeal for older high school students as well, especially those who love manga and Japanese culture.

Lisa wins the chance of a life time after entering a manga contest at San Francisco's Comic Convention (does anyone actually call it that? I'm pretty sure it's just Comic Con these days): she's going to be an intern for a year in Tokyo with a manga publisher. At first Lisa is hesitant - she hates to travel and has a comfortable life in upstate New York with an overachieving boyfriend and the friends she's had since high school. But they all gang up on her (in a mostly loving way) and convince her to make the journey to Japan.

Lisa is half-Japanese, but has rarely ventured outside of her small town in New York, and finds herself more than a bit lost in Japan's culture. Intellectually she knows it's a very polite culture where individualism is discouraged in some ways, but it's a whole different ball game actually living there! She has to deal with a crazy host family, a demanding boss, and an internship that is nothing like what she thought it was going to be.

Sometimes Lisa's lack of a backbone and the other characters' contributions to this got on my nerves - I really wanted to yell at her sometimes that she wasn't being the jerk, her boyfriend was (oh man I couldn't stand that guy). But her time in Japan made for some fascinating reading - I bet teen readers would love Lisa's host family, which consists of two overburdened parents, a twenty-something woman who parties all night and sleeps all day, and a 12 year old boy who has everyone else so under his thumb that he does nothing but play video games. Literally - he doesn't even go to school just because he doesn't want to!

I also really enjoyed that, unlike a lot of other "chick lit" that I've read, finding "the one" wasn't the point of the book. Yes there is the aforementioned jerk boyfriend, but since he's literally on the other side of the world Lisa finds lots of other things to occupy her time. It ends up being a great story about a young woman taking risks and finding out who she is and what makes her happiest.