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3.74 AVERAGE
3.74 AVERAGE
informative
Who knew that Wonder Woman, lie detectors and Planned Parenthood are all linked? I respect the research that went into this but the end dragged.
This book was intriguing, unexpected and maybe the best thing I've read all year.
It's totally not about Wonder Woman, but it's also all about Wonder Woman.
It's totally not about Wonder Woman, but it's also all about Wonder Woman.
I found it hard to follow, and in the first hour, there was very little about Wonder Woman. I also didn’t love the tone of the reader’s voice.
Lepore did a wonderful job with her research to discover this history, and she is honest where her research was not able to find answers. Very interesting history and not at all boring to read. Enhanced with pictures of both the family members and the comics.
adventurous
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
mysterious
slow-paced
Like the title says, this is a history of the genesis of comic book superhero Wonder Woman, focusing mostly on the life, family, & times of her main creator William Moulton Marston. Marston created Wonder Woman towards the end of his life, & she was his major professional achievement, coming after years of attempts to make a name for himself as an academic, pop psychologist, & lie detection expert. I was almost impressed at Marston's relentless self promotion, & also his wife(s') relentless promotion of him, often in some pretty deceptive ways. I can tell Lepore was at least somewhat amused by Olive Byrne's ongoing bit where she interviews famous psychologist W.M. Marston, while never disclosing that she's known him for years, let alone kinda married to him. Not sure if this is a trick she learned from Marston himself, who was certainly not below having his students to represent a defendant in a murder trial for the purposes of calling him as an expert witness to promote his lie-detector. The Secret History of Wonder Woman ncludes a lot about the history & milieu of the feminist & suffragist movement of the early 20th century, tying Marston's philosophy (for which Wonder Woman was his vehicle) with that of those early feminists, especially Margaret Sanger & her sister Ethel Byrne, who just happened to be the aunt & mother of his mistress/2nd wife, Olive. If it sounds confusing, it's because I was sometimes confused. My main complaint with this book is that it should have included a family tree/dramatis personae chart. Some of the captions in the color plate section do a decent concise job of explaining some of these family relationships, so I was not completely without a paddle. Also includes a fair amount about the state of the field of psychiatry in the United States during the early 20th century.
The old photos & comics featured as illustrations are amazing. As always, I'm struck by how odd the 1930s-40s comics' style is. It's hard to articulate, but I feel like the look is epitomized in the faces in the courtroom scene on pgs 76-77, & in the way Wonder Woman is running onto the daily comics page on pg 244.
Not sure I buy the Marston family's claims that the bondage fantasies featured in the early Wonder Woman comics were not enacted in reality by William, Elizabeth, & Olive, or that Elizabeth & Olive didn't have a sexual relationship of their own after William's death. The lengths the family went to cover up the fact of William, Elizabeth, & Olive's throuple (sometimes tetruple) indicates that the kids are probably not reliable narrators in that regard.
The endnotes are not completely vital to understanding this book, but they do illuminate the kinds of (& how much) research Lepore did. The amount of research that went into just reconstructing Marston's Harvard University career is amazing. & I'm kind of blown away that the Harvard University Archives contain students' class notes going back at to least 1911! The list of abbreviated names at the beginning of the notes is really helpful for keeping the various dramatis personae straight.
She has a crazy backstory that you would think was made up if it wasn't true. I think it could have been a little tighter to make it a better read. But seeing the mountain of research material that Lepore was able to gather I don't blame her for highlighting all of the little twists, secrets and coincidences that she discovered along the way.
informative
This story was generally interesting but too long and repetitive. I didn’t care too much for the writing style and the structure of the book.
While I found this book interesting as an elucidation of a little-to-unknown piece of history, I didn't care for the writer's style of short, choppy sentences. The book also suffered from a lack of much of a plot after the initial reveal of its backstory. Even though fully a fourth of its 400 pages are dedicated to indices, notes, and acknowledgements, the actual "meat" of the book is repetitive and still overly long.
Somewhere between two and three stars - three because I did make it all the way through eventually. Parts of this book are a fascinating look at the comics industry, the suffrage movement/early days of 20th century feminism, and psychology practice. But a lot is kind of a slog - while the Marston family is fascinating in some ways - I felt like a little too much time was spent on the "shock and awe" of their subversive family set-up and it never really connected back to the other themes. So it's an "okay" book that's occasionally fascinating.
There's really nothing I didn't like about this book. It's an incredibly well researched examination of how the women's suffrage and birth control movements of the early 1900s, the study of sexuality and psychology, and the invention of the lie detector test influenced William Moulton Marston's creation of Wonder Woman. As a disclaimer, the book focuses heavily on the Marston's relationships with Elizabeth Holloway and Olive Byrne, and his failed academic and professional endeavors, and how these events shaped the creation of Wonder Woman, and doesn't necessarily go in depth into the evolution of Wonder Woman over the years. However, this earlier background is essential in understanding how embedded Wonder Woman was, and continues to be, rooted in feminism and the women's rights movement.
