How do children today learn to understand stories? Why do they respond so enthusiastically to home video games and to a myth like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And how are such fads related to multinational media mergers and the "new world order"? In assessing these questions, Marsha Kinder provides a brilliant new perspective on modern media.

Marsha Kinder is Professor of Critical Studies in the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. She is the author of Blood Cinema (California 1993).

"Adventurous and imaginative. . . . Kinder draws with ease and fluency on psychoanalytical concepts from Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, as well as on the cognitive development theory of Piaget. . . . Remarkable . . . how far she has travelled from the moralistic and prescriptive terms which have dominated the debate about children's involvement with the mass media. . . . Kinder shows how children . . . have much to teach their parents about how the activity of play offers multiple opportunities to unravel the mysteries of the culture we are born into."—Sight and Sound

"What I particularly respect in Kinder's approach is that it achieves a balance between emotional proximity and critical distance; it recognizes popular pleasures while acknowledging their less desirable consequences. She avoids the 'either-or' logic that has clouded contemporary cultural studies."—Henry Jenkins, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

"Kinder posits that TV, with its endless narratives and routine interruptions, first fractures the self, and then offers consumption as the Band-Aid. . . . In suggesting that a child might now regard herself, like her heroes, as a 'gendered commodity around which a whole commercial nexus is organized,' Kinder hints at the hazards of this new mutability."—Julie Phillips, The Village Voice

"A very productive, thought-provoking analysis of new transformations in today's narrative media and their interpretations of the child-spectator."—Dana Polan, Editor,Cinema Journal