Robinson, Stacy L. Smith--Martin Morse Wooster "Washington Times"

They were falling through time together. Moth was being clubbed by Travis in perpetual night, in foreign landscapes. It was Day One. The sky was blue and Moth was dead. He fought Travis in the ring, in a palace, on a barge. He could see every fight imposed on the fight before, the past getting smaller the closer it got to the bottom of the tunnel. This fight was miles and centuries away from the first. They fought in a dream. Travis had a moustache and Moth was a boy. His hair hung down like Stanley Ketchel's. He killed Travis with one thunderous blow to the temple. Hundreds of men surrounded them in a clearing in the woods without a woman in evidence. He had always known Travis. It's the summer before the Summer of Love in the 1960s. Small-town Ontario. Beer, fights, boredom, sex. Kid stuff. Tom Walmsley's first novel in eleven years is an expansive, visceral narrative that dissects the lives of young teens loitering at the edge of adulthood. Moth and Beryl are teenaged siblings anaesthetized by their emotionally broken family; it is only in the spectacle of feral violence and the unearthliness of sex that they come alive. But they are not alone: in the circle of teens and adults that surrounds them, the brutality of the empty landscape becomes self-evident, leading them all down a path of betrayal, deception, and even murder. With an unwavering eye, Tom Walmsley captures perfectly the essence of small-town kids up to no good, if only because it is the only thing they can know. Ferocious and unabating, Kid Stuff is a bittersweet opera, about a time and place that is both then and now.

To sort out who's who and what's what in the enchanting, vexing world of Barbies(R) and Ninja Turtles(R), Tinkertoys(R) and teddy bears, is to begin to see what's become of childhood in America. It is this changing world, and what it unveils about our values, that Gary Cross explores in Kids' Stuff, a revealing look into the meaning of American toys through this century. Early in the 1900s toys reflected parents' ideas about children and their futures. Erector sets introduced boys to a realm of business and technology, while baby dolls anticipated motherhood and building blocks honed the fine motor skills of the youngest children. Kids' Stuff chronicles the transformation that occurred as the interests and intentions of parents, children, and the toy industry gradually diverged--starting in the 1930s when toymakers, marketing playthings inspired by popular favorites like Shirley Temple and Buck Rogers, began to appeal directly to the young. TV advertising, blockbuster films like Star Wars(R), and Saturday morning cartoons exploited their youthful audience in new and audacious ways. Meanwhile, powerful social and economic forces were transforming the nature of play in American society. Cross offers a richly textured account of a culture in which erector sets and baby dolls are no longer alone in preparing children for the future, and in which the toys that now crowd the racks are as perplexing for parents as they are beguiling for little boys and girls. Whether we want our children to be high achievers in a competitive world or playful and free from the worries of adult life, the toy store confronts us with many choices. What does the endless array of action figures and fashion dolls mean? Are children--or parents--the dupes of the film, television, and toy industries, with their latest fads and fantasies? What does this say about our time, and what does it bode for our future? Tapping a vein of rich cultural history, Kids' Stuff exposes the serious business behind a century of playthings.

How popular debates about the so-called digital generation mediate anxieties about labor and life in twenty-first-century America “The children are our future” goes the adage, a proclamation that simultaneously declares both anxiety as well as hope about youth as the next generation. In The Digital Is Kid Stuff, Josef Nguyen interrogates this ambivalence within discussions about today’s “digital generation” and the future of creativity, an ambivalence that toggles between the techno-pessimism that warns against the harm to children of too much screen time and a techno-utopianism that foresees these “digital natives” leading the way to innovation, economic growth, increased democratization, and national prosperity. Nguyen engages cultural histories of childhood, youth, and creativity through chapters that are each anchored to a particular digital media object or practice. Nguyen narrates the developmental arc of a future creative laborer: from a young kid playing the island fictions of Minecraft, to an older child learning do-it-yourself skills while reading Make magazine, to a teenager posting selfies on Instagram, to a young adult creative laborer imagining technological innovations using design fiction. Focusing on the constructions and valorizations of creativity, entrepreneurialism, and technological savvy, Nguyen argues that contemporary culture operates to assuage profound anxieties about—and to defuse valid critiques of—both emerging digital technologies and the precarity of employment for “creative laborers” in twenty-first-century neoliberal America.

After Bart King interviewed hundreds of the wisest guys and smartest alecks for The Big Book of Boy Stuff, something awesome happened: the book became a classic! Hailed by critics and kids alike, it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and even won awards. In this updated and redesigned tenth anniversary edition, hijinks and hilarity are still front and center. Within these pages, boys can find a myriad of things to do, things to laugh at, and things they didn’t know. Bart King, the veteran of many water balloon wars, taught middle school for many years. He’s written other cool books, including The Big Book of Superheroes, The Pocket Guide to Girl Stuff, and The Big Book of Gross Stuff. Visit his website at www.bartking.net.