Reggie Fils-Aimé’s Disrupting the Game Is About as Underwhelming as a Wii U

My review is up over at Freddie deBoer's blog

Hey subscribers and friends!

Just a quick heads-up: A while ago,

Freddie deBoer

ran a book review contest over at his blog and I managed to land runner-up with a review of Reggie Fils-Aimé’s autobiography, Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.

He posted the review today, so you can go read it if you want. Here’s a sample:

Earlier this year, I read St. Athanasius’s biography of his mentor, St. Anthony the Great. It’s a pious sort of hagiography about how Anthony was born into privilege, grew disgusted with his own wealth, gave it all away, and moved himself permanently to the desert, where he met Satan face-to-face, resisted temptation, and eventually became the father of Christian monasticism. It’s a compelling story, if you’re into that sort of thing, and Athanasius’s awe for his mentor radiates off the page.

One wonders, though, how it would read if St. Anthony himself had written it.

Self-hagiography, at least in a religious sense, is somewhat rare—mainly, one assumes, because the ones who are humble enough to qualify as saints don’t talk (or write) about themselves all that much. The same, however, can’t be said about the business world, which rewards nothing more than ego. The shortest road to success is to never admit your own mistakes and to always take credit for other people’s successes—and so, whenever a corporate exec retires, the literary world is always forced to absorb one more self-congratulating memoir in order to sate his or her ego one last time. The latest self-hagiography in this particular genre is ex-Nintendo exec Reggie Fils-Aimé’s Disrupting the Game: From the Bronx to the Top of Nintendo.

Read the rest here!