Author Jeff Ryan

2011, Portfolio/Penguin

Filed Under: Nonfiction.

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Ninetendo’s Super Mario character is easily the most iconic video game character ever created. Mario games were and are still to some extent so popular that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s never heard of them.

Nintendo has a talent for that kind of ubiquity (cf. the Wii’s popularity with senior citizens), and on Mario’s shoulders the original Nintendo Entertainment System made “Nintendo” synonymous with “videogame” for a decade or more. Unless you were one of those kids with a Sega (sorry), your house was probably as likely to have an NES as a VCR. If it didn’t, you certainly had friends who had one.

Someone gave my grandfather an NES when I was 4 or 5. It had Super Mario Bros. (like lots of other adults he pronounced it Mare-E-Oh which drove me nuts), the combo pack with Duck Hunt and Track Meet (remember that weird PowerPad?). I was soon obsessed. More than two decades later, Nintendo games still have a significant claim on my leisure time staked out. I likely play more video games than most people my age–but that’s hard to guess, because in the past few years the rise of geek chic has made videogames socially acceptable.

So essentially, this book is a history of a toy company that’s been siphoning my money for almost 30 years and will probably continue to do so for a long time to come. It makes for an interesting story primarily because (and I’m admitting a weakness here) of how hard it is for Nintendo to do wrong by loyalists like me (I have a Virtual Boy in my closet). It’s a curious success they have, one I’m sure other companies wish they could achieve. I certainly don’t have the same rabid devotion to Random House. …
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Author: Joel Brinkley

2011, Black, Inc.

Filed Under: Nonfiction.

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In his foreword to Marie Alexandrine Martin’s Cambodia: A Shattered Society, Jean-François Baré wrote, “At the head of the list of vanquished, I would obviously be inclined, as would Marie Martin, to place the Khmer people, a martyred people. But the Khmer people also produced the Pol Pots, the Ieng Sarys, the Khieu Samphans, the barely adolescent yothea who, under their leaders’ directions, used methodical and murderous obstinacy in applying Bertolt Brecht’s sorrowful aphorism: ‘If something about a country is wrong, you have to change the people and choose another one’–this same Khmer people, imbued among other interacting factors with a concept of hierarchy (neak chuo, knowing one’s place) that worked both to help make Cambodia so peaceful and to make the Khmer revolution so terrible when ‘the children were in power,’ through an astonishing and terrible structural reversal.”

Forget about the tribes (whose countries are now called Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam) that migrated from their ancestral home in southern China to Southeast Asia and engulfed the lands of Mon, Khmer, and Malay. Forget about Thailand and Vietnam’s tug-of-war for supremacy in this region, using Cambodia as a rope, the ironclad colonization by the French, the American bombings, or Vietnam and China’s influences. Disregard the fact that the Khmer Rouge leaders consisted of ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese and studied Marxism in Paris. What Jean-François Baré is driving at in his foreword is: there’s no one to blame for Cambodia’s weakness and demise but the Khmers themselves.

No one revels in this sentiment more than Joel Brinkley in Cambodia’s Curse. He devotes his entire book to show how the Khmer leaders (psychopathic, autocratic, and kleptocratic) and people (ignorant, stupid, lazy, foolish and gullible) are a hopeless case and therefore, can’t be saved. Basically, the donors should not give Cambodia’s government any more money and should pack up and go home.

In fact, the premise of Cambodia’s Curse is to debunk those who attributed the American bombing to the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, which ultimately killed almost two million of its own people and destroyed its entire nation. …
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