Born in 1866, she was an unmarried stenographer whose passions included politics and - even more rare among women of that era - inventing. To trace how far removed this was from the truth, Pilon introduces Elizabeth Magie. After selling it to Parker Brothers in 1935, he lived lavishly ever after on the proceeds. What dyed-in-the-wool free marketeer invented this cardboard facsimile of real estate markets, and who owns it now? From whose ideas did it evolve? These are the questions Mary Pilon, formerly a reporter at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, proposes to answer in her briskly enlightening first book, “The Monopolists.” For decades the official story, slipped into every Monopoly box, was that Charles Darrow, an unemployed salesman, had a sudden light-bulb moment about a game to amuse his poor family during the Depression. The game is sufficiently redolent of capitalism that in 1959 Fidel Castro ordered the destruction of every Monopoly set in Cuba, while these days Vladimir Putin seems to be its ultimate aficionado. Played by everyone from Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger to Carmela and Tony Soprano, it apparently scratches an itch to wheel and deal few of us can reach in real life. Our favorite board game, of course, is Monopoly, which has also gone global, and for similar reasons. The national card game of the world’s first market democracy naturally turned out to be poker, in part because money is its language, raison d’être and means of keeping score.
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