Mary Pilon’s The Monopolists reviewed for Slate Book Review:

You can tell a lot about a family by its house Monopoly rules. The rules I grew up with, inherited from my father and his three boisterous, competitive brothers, were cutthroat. There was no namby-pamby $500 bill on Free Parking. It was completely permitted to let your game piece float a space or two ahead of where the dice dictated, so long as your opponents didn’t notice before next roll, putting everyone in a constant state of mutual suspicion that made deal-making very fraught. Games could last for days. Whenever I made a move directly against my father—buying up all his favorite orange properties, or lining an entire side of the board with hotels when he was about to pass through—he would murmur, approvingly, “You devil, you.”

Monopoly’s savagery can extend beyond the board. This past November, a New Hampshire woman was charged with domestic violence for slapping her boyfriend during a game. The British royal family, Prince Andrew said in 2008, isn’t permitted to play it at home because “it gets too vicious.” All of these people, and my own family, and anyone else who has threatened to eviscerate a loved one over their income-tax accounting, should be required to read Mary Pilon’s enthralling new history of the long, pitched battle over the origins of the game, The Monopolists. Starving out your enemy until he breaks may make for a fun family games night, but in real life, it’s significantly less enjoyable for everyone involved—the ostensible winners as well as the losers.