The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favourite Board Game
Mary Pilon
Bloomsbury USA, 313pp, $27/£20
My dad was born in 1924, five years before the great crash of 1929. One of the founding stories of my childhood was about his childhood: how, as a poor kid in New Haven, Connecticut, he really wanted a Monopoly set but couldn’t dream of affording one – and so he made his own. The board, the counters, the money, the whole nine yards. He was about ten or 11 at the time, at least that’s what I recall. But it was only after reading The Monopolists, Mary Pilon’s entertaining and revelatory account of the game’s origins, that I realised there’s one question I never asked him: which Monopoly set did he make?
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