Exuberantly researched and written ... Although Kimmel’s overflowing, somewhat repetitive toybox of a book cries for some winnowing, it also sparks plenty of wonder – along with a fresh understanding of the serious business of play.
An endearing if cluttered history ... Kimmel’s tone is celebratory as much as exploratory, arguing that Jews were uniquely positioned to thrive in American toy entrepreneurship ... Concerned as it is with the business of fun, Playmakers can’t help being fun to read, in a patchwork, Raggedy Andy sort of way ... But Kimmel gets easily distracted and diverted ... It stops short of drawing the full circle to how America’s adults became children.
Draws tenuous connections ... Ignores inconvenient facts ... He blurs his focus to cover the well-trodden territory of the comics business and the Jewish artists who channelled their acute sense of outsider status into creating characters like Clark Kent.
In the absence of sufficient evidence to support these repeated claims, they have the whiff of pop psychology, and one gets the sense that Mr. Kimmel is straining to bend the facts to his interpretation.
