White Man said:
Read a pre-release of this about 3 months ago. It's not very good.
Read the Scientific American review on that Amazon page. That sums up most of my qualms with the book. It's got a rather off-putting tone to it, too.
EDIT: Also, much like gaming's opponents, his major arguments are based on opinions that can't be proven, and things that can't be measured in any sort of meaningful way. It reads like someone going contrary to current thought just for the sake of being different.
It annoys me that Scientific American tried to review this book like it was a research article in an academic social science/education journal. Ya - sure - most of the guys' claims haven't been validated empirically, and have not been proven to be statistically significant at the .001 level. Blah blah blah.....
But - he never claimed to be writing a social science research book. He is exploring a public policy issue here, namely, the degree to which society ought to value video games. Certainly, it is an "issue tour", but, from all that I have read on this topic, it is probably the best "issue tour" on video games that I have read.
And - if a group of educational researchers took this book seriously, they could easily design a series of studies that would allow them to empirically test his claims.
But - like everything else with video games in the media - it's just not fashionable to take video games seriously. It's way more interesting to slam this interesting and well-written book in Scientific American, and then go back to another story on how GTA turns kids into killers.