Overview

In 1902, Morris and Rose Michtom invented the Teddy Bear in the back room of their Brooklyn candy store. Together they launched the Ideal Toy Corporation, joining a set of other poor, first-generation Jewish toymakers. Playmakers reveals how the toy industry created the idealized American childhood: an enchanted world, full of wild creatures and eternal struggles between good and evil, with endless realms of fantasy and beauty. For much of the twentieth century, every part of the American toy business was largely Jewish. A descendant of the founders of the Ideal Toy Corporation, Michael Kimmel shows how these poor, often Yiddish-speaking, tenement-dwelling children of immigrants invented a world they never experienced for themselves. Kimmel also portrays the rise of an entire culture focused on children, led by Jewish comic book creators, children's authors, parenting experts, and child psychologists. The first full-scale toy history of the United States, Kimmel's story conjures the colorful, imaginative, restless spirits who followed the promise of the American Dream--and describes the ways in which the world they came from molded their beloved creations. Playmakers shows that the overlapping experiences of being a Jew, an immigrant, and a child in twentieth-century America created childhood as we know it today.

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Michael Kimmel is one of the world's leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, and Angry White Men. He is the founding editor of Men and Masculinities, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal, and in 2013 he founded the world's first Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities. He has offered presentations at over 300 colleges and universities, consulted with governments and United Nations, and worked with many of the world's leading corporations to engage men in support of gender equality. A veteran audiobook narrator, Adam Grupper has recorded more than eighty titles and garnered honors from AudioFile magazine, Publishers Weekly, iTunes, the Society of Voice Arts and Sciences, and the Audio Publishers Association. He has been in eleven Broadway productions, including the acclaimed revival of Fiddler on the Roof. His film and television credits include The Rebound, Homeland, Master of None, Music and Lyrics, Two Weeks Notice, Elementary, and Allegiance.

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