Lepore mines new archival sources to reconstruct Marston’s tangled home life and the controversy generated by Wonder Woman....
The surprising origins of a 20th-century goddess.
Wonder Woman, writes Lepore (History/Harvard Univ.; Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, 2013), “was the product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women’s liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.” Long-legged, wearing short shorts and knee-high red boots, Wonder Woman burst into comics in 1941, the creation of William Moulton Marston, a Harvard-educated psychologist. Marston, a master at self-promotion, had failed as a college professor; colleagues scorned his publicity stunts. When he tried to market himself as a psychology consultant to the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover opened a file on him. Among the many topics on which Marston expounded was women’s power. “Women have twice the emotional development, the ability for love, than man has,” he announced. Oddly, he also believed that submission and bondage were intrinsic to women’s happiness. “In episode after episode,” writes Lepore, “Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled,” scenes that Marston described “in careful, intimate detail, with utmost precision,” so that the artist who drew the series could get them exactly right. The creation, publishing history and eventual demise of the cartoon character are only part of Lepore’s story, which uncovers the secret of Marston’s startlingly unconventional family. Married to Elizabeth “Betty” Holloway, who often provided the family’s sole support, Marston brought into their home Olive Byrne, the niece of Margaret Sanger. Byrne had been his student, became his mistress, and had two of his children, who were brought up thinking their father had died. Marston had two children with Holloway, as well, whom Byrne raised, freeing Holloway to go to work. After Marston’s death in 1947, the two women spent the rest of their lives together.
Lepore mines new archival sources to reconstruct Marston’s tangled home life and the controversy generated by Wonder Woman. It’s an irresistible story, and the author tells it with relish and delight.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35404-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
SEEN & HEARD
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.
A fascinating unpacking of ancient myths that feature robots and other lifelike beings, some of which bear an eerie resemblance to modern technology.
More than 2,000 years ago, Greek thinkers were already envisioning the spectacular potential of being “made, not born.” As Mayor (The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World, 2014, etc.), a research scholar in classics and the history of science at Stanford, writes, during ancient times, “we…find a remarkable set of concepts and ideas that arose in mythology, stories that envisioned ways of imitating, augmenting, and surpassing natural life by means that might be termed bio-techne, ‘life through craft’…ancient versions of what we now call biotechnology.” The bronze giant Talos, protector of Crete, appears in numerous poems and artworks, some dating to 500 B.C.E.; Jason, of the Argonauts, is depicted as battling a phalanx of robotlike soldiers sprung from the earth and programmed to kill. Of course, these episodes are fiction, but they reveal the sophistication of the ancients’ imagined automata. In her meticulous research, the author discovers that the Greeks were hardly alone in conceiving mechanistic warriors, servants, or evil human replicas. Surviving myths from Rome, India, and China also explore ideas of artificial life and intelligence. In her insightful analyses of these tales, Mayor is approachable and engaging, and she infuses many familiar stories with new energy in the context of technology. She adroitly explores the ethical aspects of artificial life, addressing big questions about sentience and agency through the lens of ancient ideas. She also makes a convincing argument that these imagined machines anticipated advances that are considered cutting-edge today. Ultimately, she leaves readers in awe of these thinkers who dreamed of “androids” long before it was conceivable to build them.
A collection of wondrous tales that present ancient myths as the proto–science fiction stories they are.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-18351-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Astute examination of a stymied system.
A veteran reporter explains the loss of compromise in contemporary American politics.
Los Angeles Times national correspondent Brownstein writes proficiently about the Red/Blue divide, demonstrating how it plays out not so much among voters as in the halls of Congress, where partisanship has virtually destroyed cooperation between Republicans and Democrats. Ignore the overzealous title: There is no civil war, but rather a “dangerous impasse,” as the author writes, where party loyalty and ideology now prevent efficient government action on pressing national issues from health care to immigration. Brownstein provides much-needed perspective by examining the history of modern American politicking, from the four highly partisan decades beginning with the 1896 McKinley-Bryan election to the “golden age” of cooperation in Congress extending from the presidential administrations of FDR to Lyndon Johnson, when politicians were less polarized. Politics became more combative from 1964 to 1990, writes the author, as rising special-interest groups of the Left and Right gradually helped form the Democratic and Republican party “bases,” and Congressional floor debates filled with rhetoric aimed at TV audiences. At the same time, cultural values replaced class as the focus of national politics. The GOP became the party of culturally traditional, churchgoing suburban Americans, and the Democrats attracted primarily singles, seculars, homosexuals, nonwhites and others more comfortable with urban diversity. The Republican strategy under President George W. Bush has exploited and deepened these differences, says Brownstein, fostering a hyper-partisan system that rewards party discipline and discourages compromise. The author traces the roles of the media, lobbyists and other factors, and argues for reforms—restoring the Fairness Doctrine, for example—to create a less confrontational politics of consensus. For all their disagreements, notes the author, voters are less polarized than Washington politicos and would welcome national leadership that reconciles, unites and gets things done.
Astute examination of a stymied system.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59420-139-4
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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