Investigating Lois Lane by Tim Hanley

Lois Lane is one of the most recognized names among superhero comic book characters even though she is not a superhero. The intrepid reporter made has been around for more than 80 years, and her history is recounted by Tim Hanley in Investigating Lois Lane.

Lois was not in the original Superman stories created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. As they worked and reworked the character, setting and supporting cast in an attempt to come up with something that would sell, they took inspiration or the girl reporter movies of the time to add a love interest for the man of steel. Several popular movies in the mid-1930s featured smart, tough, fast-talking, blonde female reporters such as Torchy Blane, a character that premiered in 1937’s Smart Blonde.

Schuster’s innovation was to make Lois brunette. He took inspiration from Jolan (Joanne) Kovacs, a high school student in Cleveland who advertised herself for modeling.  Schuster was apparently smitten with her—she was his model Lois, and all his other heroines resembled Lois—and they stayed in touch as she moved around the country pursuing her modeling career. They met up again in New York after World War II. He invited her to a ball—even rented a gown for her. Jerry Siegel was there, too, and she left with him. Siegel left his wife and young son to marry Kovaks.

Not only was Lois a career woman, an unusual thing when she premiered with Superman in 1938, she was also headstrong, cunning, independent and determined to become a top reporter. However, the writers of Lois’ stories were men; the first Lois Lane story written by a woman, Tasmyn O’Flynn, was published in 1982.  Though she remained a working woman, she was often depicted as a damsel in distress or a love-struck cheerleader for Superman.

Depictions of Lois changed over time as the status of women changed in American society. Sometimes she was at the forefront, as she briefly was in the women’s liberation movement during the 1970s. Other time she lagged and reflecting traditional role for women, or Superman and others shamed her unfeminine ambition. Too often she was simply a background player in Superman stories, even though she was more than able to carry a story on her own in the hands of writers who cared.

Such ups and downs will likely be Lois’ fate for a while. We can hope that she get the treatment she deserves with stories that let her shine.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Hanley, Tim. Investigating Lois Lane: The Turbulent History of the Daily Planet’s Ace Reporter. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

When I want to find some information, I can pull my cell phone out of my pocket and search for it using Google (or some other search engine, but probably Google). I can remember a time when that was not an option. If the information I needed wasn’t in the dictionary or encyclopedia I had at home (which was already of date in some areas), I’d have to go to the library for additional references or—heaven forbid—the morgue of a newspaper office. Getting useful information was not a trivial affair. The generation before mine that saw a pre-Internet explosion of printed information after World War II especially felt the difficulty of keeping up. Evelyn Wood was there with an answer; Marcia Biederman tells her story in Scan Artist.

Evelyn Wood did not invent speed reading. She did not even like the term. However, for decades her name and face was more strongly associated with it than any other person. Though she built her reputation on being a school teacher, she never was not a regular classroom teacher (she was a school counselor) and she was not a reading specialist. She had a master’s degree in speech, earned under the direction of a professor who a studied theater.

Theater may be the lens for looking at Wood’s career. She started writing and staging plays when she was in high school and a college undergraduate. Many of these had religious themes related to her Mormon faith. When she was in Germany, where her husband served as president of the Mormon mission in Frankfurt as the Nazis began their aggressions, she fell in love with the opera and cajoled her way into back stage of the opera house. She began bringing what she learned of stagecraft into her own productions.

Back in the U.S. the Woods put Evelyn’s theatrical skills to work as lecturers on their European experience. They changed their focus as American sentiments shifted from Germany to Britain. They also put a pretty heavy spin on the Mormon relationship with the Nazis and greatly embellished the dangers they face leaving Germany.

Evelyn Wood’s success as a seller of her speed-reading system was largely built on such theatrics and embellishments. She claimed student could read thousands of words per minute; the faster one read the better their comprehension. (The fastest people can actually read is about 900 words per minute. Anything faster is skimming, and comprehension suffers when one skims). She managed to get endorsements from senators and she encouraged, or at least never corrected, the misconception that she was tied to John F. Kennedy and his reportedly fast reading speed. (Ted Kennedy took her course as a senator, and staffers in the Kennedy, Nixon and Carter administrations took the course, including Jimmy Carter himself, though Wood was not the teacher.)

The company she started changed hands and business models several times. A lot of money was made with her name and methods, and in the sale and resale of the company, but the Woods received only a small portion of it. Even so, she was ready to promote herself, her methods and the company that still paid her a consulting fee. She slowed down, but continued to make appearances and accept interview requests even after suffering cancer and a stroke.

While one may sympathize with her, especially in her illness later in life, the Evelyn Wood presented by Biederman is not easy to like. The Wood adopted a teenage girl largely to have a live-in nanny for their natural daughter when they moved to Germany; they never really acknowledge their adopted daughter or even saw her much once she was an adult. Wood was in some ways a con artist who played on the insecurities of her marks, some who were never knocked in spite of the mounting evidence that her program was at best an overprice lesson in skimming.

Wood found a way to take advantage of the insecurity of her day. She built a brand on it. While primarily a biography of Wood, Scan Artist reveals interesting things about America of the time and the obsession with self-improvement. It has not disappeared. Speed-reading apps still claim to greatly increase both speed and comprehension. TED-talkers claim to read a book or more a day. The Internet makes it easy to acquire a shallow knowledge of almost anything quickly, so perhaps people have become satisfied with what they can learn from skimming hundreds of books a year. Deep learning and understanding remains slow and effortful.

Biederman, Marcia. Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World that Speed-Reading Worked. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019.

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

World War II was a time when secrecy was often a necessary part of security. The secrecy surrounding the development to of the atomic bomb was particularly thick. Since that veil was lifted, Las Alamos, Nevada, has become strongly associated with the bomb, as it should be. However, there were other locations critical to the project. Denis Kiernan discusses one of them, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in her book The Girls of Atomic City.

The Clinton Engineer Works was part of the Manhattan Project. Its purpose was the enrichment of uranium to supply the research, development and construction of an atomic weapon. When it was built, the Army took over thousands of acres of farmland in Tennessee, displacing the residents. Oak Ridge did not exist before the project.

As the title suggests, Kiernan focuses on the role of women at the Clinton Engineer Works, as the area was known when it was a military reservation. The book draws on her interviews with women who worked at the site; the experiences of nine particular women serve as guideposts for the story. These women served in a variety of roles: statistician, chemist, inspector, equipment operator, nurse, secretary, and janitor. Some became wives and mothers as well during the war years. It was an interesting time when there was space for women in science, technology and manufacturing, but not a lot.

Kiernan reaches outside of Oak Ridge to mention other notable women who played a part. German physicist Lise Meitner coined the term nuclear fission; she had Jewish ancestors and fled to Sweden as the Nazis came to power in her homeland. Earlier, Ida Noddack was the first to suggest that the atomic nucleus could split, an idea that was initially rejected by many scientists studying radioactivity and the inner workings of the atom.

The growth of families in a place designed solely for one purpose suggested a result that had not been considered when the Army started to build the Clinton Engineer Works. Oak Ridge was becoming a community and it eventually became an incorporated city (in 1958 by a vote of the residents after federal and state laws opened the opportunity). Though the population dropped dramatically from its war-time peak, Oak Ridge remained a center for research in nuclear energy and the peace-time use of radioactive materials as it transitioned to civilian control. Today the Oak Ridge National Laboratory continues research in energy and computing. The city of Oak Ridge continues as well, still connected to its past as a unique factory town, but in many way a city like any other.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynman

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Kiernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. 2013. New York Touchstone: 2014.

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Superhero comics have been around for more than 70 year. Women adventurers started to don costumes soon after Superman showed how fun—and lucrative—it could be. Mike Madrid describes the history of these heroines in The Supergirls.

Comic book publishers have often followed fads and borrowed ideas and genres from other media. Even though superheroes originated in comic books, they still often reflected the prevailing views of their times and sometimes lagged other media in responding to changes in culture. This is particularly true for the depiction of superheroines.

Madrid shows how the ups and downs of women in American culture were reflected in the lives of their colorful, pulp counterparts. This follows a roughly decade by decade structure beginning in the 1940s when Wonder Woman appeared to fight oppressors and teach the world about the superiority of love, and the 2000s when relatively mature and complex female characters started to become more common.

It’s interesting to me that the World War II-era superheroines were tougher, more independent and more feminist than most the female characters in the decades that followed. Wonder Woman had an openly feminist agenda and aimed to teach girls to be women who could be strong and gracious, though the comic also reflected some the more peculiar perspectives of their creator and writer William Marston Moulton.

Until recently, women in comics had to be something. The had to be object lessons, girlfriends, hangers on, helpers, cheerleaders, career women, glamorous vixens, virgins, princesses,  husband hunters or whatever else a woman was supposed to be in that era. It took a long time for comics to come around to a woman being a person. Still super-powered and still a woman, but fundamentally a person.

As I read this book, I also thought about my profession. I’ve worked as an engineer for more than 20 years. Women are much more common in engineering than they once were, but there is still a push to attract women to the field. I think we sometimes get derailed by trying to prove that girls can like STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) as much as boy can.  Of course, they can. We should also think that the appeal of engineering may be in other thing, for both boys and girls. I was interested in technology as a kid (and enjoyed reading the adventures of Iron Man and Mister Fantastic), but I was also interested in justice, health, economic mobility, and the potential of water, power and mobility to make people’s lives better. I’m not that interested in technology for its own sake, but I’m very interested in how technology can lead to solutions that make people healthier, richer, more connected and happier. I think that is something that could be appealing to many girls, especially to girls who read comics.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in.

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Madrid, Mike. The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines. Exterminating Angels Press, 2009.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe

Marvel Comics has a long history in comic books, especially superhero comics. It’s first superheroes, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, debuted in 1939 and the company is currently unrolling popular series of films based on a The Avengers, a superhero team that first appeared in comics in 1963.

The extended, interconnected, iterative melodrama of Marvel’s comics is a complicated fictional world. The real-world company has a complicated history, too. It started as a scion of a pulp magazine publisher seeking diversify and is now a part of media powerhouse Walt Disney Company. Sean Howe provides a detailed history of the company in Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.

Howe divides the history of the Marvel into five major ages. He discusses the early history of the company, but Marvel as we know it today could mark its origins in the resurgence of superhero comics of the early 1960s, after a post-World War II slump that all but the most popular titles.

The succeeding ages roughly correspond to the decades. The 1960s marked the birth of modern Marvel. The 1970s were a time of artistic experimentation when comics, especially Marvel, were embraced on college campus and in the counterculture.

In the 1980s, kids who grew up reading Marvel became adults writing the comics. It was also a time when corporate culture began to consume the company—though the priority of making money, executive interference and possibly shady business was something that went back to the days of the pulps. This decade also marked a change in the way comics were sold, shifting from newsstands and grocery-store spinners to specialty shops, which created opportunities and problems for comics publishers.

The 1990s was a period of excess. Comics creators were finally making money (at least some of them were), but old contentions between publishers—especially Marvel—and writers and artists led to the rise of superstars spinning off to publish works to which they would retain the rights. The growth in comics collecting encouraged marketing practice, especially at Marvel, that eventually led to a bust.

Throughout this time, Marvel’s various owners had been attempting to transition the company from a comics publisher to a media company that leveraged its intellectual property in many ways. In the 2000s, Marvel has done that. A criticism often leveled against Marvel today is that the comics are driven by decisions to make the characters marketable in other media, especially movies and toys.

Comics have come a long way since I started reading them as a kid. For one thing, they cost 10 times as much. Howe wraps up with the opinion that Marvels products are better, and in some ways I agree. However, I think comics often uses the words mature and adult when they are simply prurient, and that the improvement in printing quality is not always accompanied by improvements in story or art. I have mixed feelings about the multi-issues stories designed for collection into graphic novels aimed at book retailers, but I think the event-driven mega-crossovers that have become standard for Marvel and DC don’t move me much—I’d rather read a good short story than an overblown novel.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

1939 by David Gelernter

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Howe, S. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Much of the world, and America is particular, is heavily networked through a vast, distributed communication system of computers, cables, and transceivers. All this runs on electricity. Our major infrastructure is dependent on electrical power: water, sanitation, healthcare, communication and transportation. These systems, indeed even the systems that generate and distribute electricity are increasing controlled by networked computers.

This makes America extremely vulnerable to cyberattacks aimed at the electric system. If a major section of the power grid goes out, millions of people could be left without clean water, waste disposal and food. A well-orchestrated cyberattack could leave large parts of the country without power for as long as a year.

Journalist Ted Koppel explores this situation, and criticizes America’s state of unpreparedness and sometimes denial, in his book Lights Out. There are three major parts to his book.

First, he explores the vulnerability of the electrical system to cyberattack. I think he makes a fairly convincing case that the system is vulnerable and that some agents very likely already have the capacity to cause major damage to the system that could affect huge parts of the country.

Second, he looks into the state of our policies and preparedness. As you might expect for a nation of 50 co-sovereign governments, it is a patchwork. In addition, the major actors in preventing, planning for, and responding to catastrophes are focused on natural disasters or physical attacks by terrorists. These things shouldn’t be ignored, but the scale of a cyberattack on the electrical system could have a much larger scope in terms of the populations and territories affected.

Finally, he looks at how prepared the country is for the aftermath of such an attack. The answer is we are woefully unprepared. He looks into the prepper movement and the vast resources the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has put into readiness. He finds some models there, but no one has the resources to respond to such a massive disaster.

Of course, the issue is not simple. Preventing such an attack is difficult even if all the competing interests (utilities, federal agencies, local and state governments, privacy advocates, and many others) could agree on what to do, who should do it, and how far their authority should extend. It is all hugely expensive, especially preparing to respond to a massive outage, and it would take years to get ready.

Even so, Koppel clearly thinks we should acknowledge this vulnerability and start doing something about it. An imperfect plan, even if it is too little to late (it’s already too late because cyberattacks are already happening and major attacks could be launched with the press of a button), is better than no plan. He looks to the civil defense planning during World War II and the Cold War. Much of it was misguided or for show, but we learned valuable lessons that helped us make more effective responses and develop better policies.

Koppel writes as a journalist for a wide audience, and that was his intention. Readers do not need a background in engineering, utilities or security to understand the issues he brings up or their implications.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Koppel, Ted. Lights Out. New York: Crown, 2015.

The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley

In 1905, then Secretary of War William Taft and a host of other American dignitaries took a tour of Pacific islands and Asian nations. James Bradley tells the story of this trip, along with the wider contest of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policies toward Pacific expansion and Asia, in The Imperial Cruise.

Roosevelt, with Taft as his right hand, engaged in secret diplomacy with Japan. The Senate would not have approved a treaty with Japan with terms Roosevelt wanted, and his own State Department would have strongly advised against his course. So Roosevelt sent Taft to consummate a secret deal that he could never acknowledge.

By the time Taft set sail, Japan was already responding to interactions with the West. It was remaking itself into an industrialized, militarized country in the western mold. Roosevelt saw in them American-friendly, quasi-civilized people who could expand Anglo-Saxon virtues into Asia without slipping out from under Anglo-American influence. As with almost everything related to the Pacific and Asian peoples, Roosevelt was very shortsighted.

In reading about the early 20^th Century, I’ve been struck by the pervasiveness of racism. Bradley explains how Roosevelt viewed everything through a racial lens. These were racial lenses were proudly worn by white elites at the time. The key to history was racial history. They saw the birth of civilization in the Middle East with the Aryans, who began moving west. Around the Mediterranean, where the Aryans mixed with other races, civilizations degenerated. In Germany, pure Aryans gave rise to Teutons, who inherited Aryan civilizing with values of democracy and individualism. These Teutons moved west and were further perfected in the Anglo-Saxons. Anglo-Saxon civilization leapt across the Atlantic and push aside the savages of North America. To Roosevelt, Manifest Destiny had not closed with the conquering of the continent; it was ready to spread into the Pacific. White men would continue to spread their civilizing influence, subjugating or exterminating lesser, browner races when necessary as white Americans had done to their Indian wards. White elites like Roosevelt saw their westward destiny in this racial history, and it was further confirm by science in Darwinian survival of the fittest.

History and science refute such notions now. Bradley (and I) certainly don’t try to justify the attitudes or actions of Roosevelt, Taft or others. Bradley is plainly critical of handling of Pacific islands and Asia. Roosevelt’s racial views blinded him to the abilities and patriotism of non-whites. He had the hubris to pursue diplomacy on his own, secretly, without advice from the State Department, Senate or anyone else who might raise the slightest objection or concern. He tutored Japan in the ways of western imperialism, but could not imagine how well they would learn the lessons. Bradley places at least some of the blame for World War II in the Pacific at the feet of Roosevelt, whose interventions created the powerful military empire we faced in those waters.

Roosevelt was an astute manager of his image and he understood public relations. Because of this, he sent his oldest (and nearly estranged) daughter Alice on the trip. She was a celebrity, and her presence assured a lot of press coverage. Her presence was also a distraction from Taft’s secret mission.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

First Samuel

Life is So Good by George Dawson & Richard Glaubman

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

Water by Steven Solomon

Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

The Wright Brothers by David McCollough

Brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright rose to fame at the beginning of the 20^th Century by building the first successful manned, powered flying machine. In popular culture, they tend to be presented as geniuses who went out to Kitty Hawk and started flying one day. In his biography of these men, The Wright Brothers, David McCollough does not dispel the notion of genius, but he focuses on their courage, determination, careful study, methodical approach, and persistence in the pursuit of something they believed could be.

As boys, the brothers were inspired by a toy to consider the possibility of flight. As grown men, they made a careful study of it. Before beginning their experiments, they gathered the available information, including contacts with earlier experimenters in flight such as Octave Chanute and Samuel Pierpont Langley (the director of the Smithsonian Institute who’s “aerodrome” was a failed early flyer). When they began conducting their own experiments with kites (and later using a small wind tunnel they made), they found the published data to be lacking in useful or correct information.

Therefore, it was mainly on their own that the brothers invented their flyers and the means of piloting them. They had the practical view that inventing a flying machine included inventing the method for controlling it in flight.

An interesting note is that the Wrights funded their experiments and first airplanes with their own money. Their bicycle shop must have produced a decent income, but they lived modestly. They lived in a modest home together with their father and sister until after they completed built three working airplanes, the third model being the one they demonstrated publicly. Even after they began to make money making airplanes and decided to build a new, larger house, they shared it. Wilbur’s only request for the new house was that he have his own bedroom and bathroom.

McCollough emphasizes how much the success of Wilbur and Orville was a family affair. They were close to their widowed father, who survived Wilbur by two years. Once they began to demonstrate their airplane and make a build a business on it, their sister Katherine became a social manager for them, and she share a house with Orville until she married at the age of 52 (she passed away three year later). Orville had a long life and saw many improvements in aviation after he sold the company, including Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight and the use of bombers in World War II.

The book is fairly brief. McCollough concentrates on the period when the Wrights were most involved in experimenting with, building, and ultimately demonstrating their invention. Even so, one gets a sense of what the brothers and their immediate family and friends were like.

David McCollough also wrote The Great Bridge. 

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

McCullough, David. The Wright Brothers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Amazing Fantastic Incredible by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

When a book is entitled Amazing Fantastic Incredible, Stan Lee must be involved. That is the title of Lee’s graphic novel memoir, co-written with Peter David with art by Colleen Doran, about his long career in comic books.

Lee has a career in comic books going back the Golden Age. He started working in comics soon after they became a popular medium. Few people have had a career in comic books as long as Lee’s, partly because he is still working. No one has been the public face of comic books, or a spokesman and promotor for the medium, as much as Lee.

Because Lee’s career in comics is well known, at least among fans, some of the more interesting parts of the memoir deal with other aspects of his life. He depicts himself as being crazy in love with his wife, Joan, even after decades of marriage. He recalls himself as a lonely kid during the Great Depression, who took refuge in books and the world of his own imagination. He retelling of his army service during World War II, mostly serving as a writer stateside, is mostly humorous.

I suspect Lee’s humor has a lot to do with his popularity. He comes across as self-aggrandizing with a self-deprecating wink.

Even so, Lee’s status as a comics celebrity has sparked criticism in some circles. He was the face of Marvel Comics, and so has taken the heat for the way the publisher treated the artist who worked for him (comics publishers treated artists shabbily for decades). Maybe he could have done more for the artists who worked for him, and maybe he would have been unemployed if he tried. Lee doesn’t get into this matter much, but when he does he shifts the blame to publisher Martin Goodman.

Lee addresses some of his most famous characters and the artists who co-created them. Some might see his recognition of co-creators as a defense against detractors who say he has claimed too much credit. I think the book presents the situation the way Lee would like to remember, and the way he would like others to remember it. I think he genuinely liked and admired many of the people he worked with. Throughout the book, Jack Kirby is depicted as handsome, powerful and dynamic, almost like a superhero, even when there was a rift if their personal and professional relationship.

This is a memoir, not an autobiography. Lee and his collaborators do not attempt to independently confirm memories, though they straightforward about some memories being fuzzy. A few scenes a clearly constructed to present information in a manner more interesting than direct exposition, though they may have had some root in an actual event. Lee’s conversations with his boyhood self are plainly fictional; I thought they tended to be the weakest parts of the book, though they were functional.

Fans of Lee will probably enjoy the book. Someone who wants a brief and easy history of comics, and isn’t too concerned about the lopsidedness that would naturally come with Lee’s perspective, might also like it. Lee would know, he was there.

Stan Lee also wrote Spider-Man with Steve Ditko. Peter David also wrote Writing for Comics with Peter David.

If  you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

Lee, Stan, Peter David & Colleen Doran. Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir. New York: Touchstone, 2015.

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

German physicist Max Planck was one of the most famous and well-respected scientists of his day. His work formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and is still relevant to physics today. He lived through both world wars, and these resulted in tragedy for his family.

Planck is a brief biography of the man by another physicist, Brandon R. Brown. Brown focuses his book on the last years of World War II, but from there reaches far back to his subject’s birth in 1858 and forward a little to his death in 1947. It is interesting that Brown did not choose to take a chronological approach given that entropy and the irreversibility of time were subjects of great interest to Planck. Perhaps he wants to readers to be somewhat unsettled, no doubt the way Planck must have been unsettled by events of his lifetime and the conclusions younger scientists drew from his own theories.

Brown presents Planck and as a flexible thinker who contributed to physics and accepted new theories at an age when most of his contemporaries were ready to shut the books on what could be learned. Apparently what most of us like to think of as middle-aged (at worst) is ancient for a physicist. His own work on thermal radiation established fundamental concepts of quantum theory, though he didn’t use the term “quanta.” When a young Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, Planck quick promote and build on it. He was slower to come around to general relativity (as wild as it is to us, it was insane to many in that time), and both men suffered philosophical heartburn from the quantum mechanics served up by the generation that came up under them.

Planck was very loyal to his country. His brother Hermann died in the Franco-Prussian War, and the family became intensely patriotic. At the start of World War I, he was hopeful that the war might strengthen and unify Germany. His oldest son, Karl, died at Verdun, and Germany fell on hard times.

Things were more complex when the Nazis took power. At times, his reputation as the nation’s most prominent scientist gave him leeway to resist anti-Semitic policies. At other times he acquiesced, hoping that the excesses of Nazi policies would be smoothed out or even reversed by the necessities of governing and the needs of the nation. He was so hopeful he even encouraged Jewish colleagues to stay. The Nazis saw no need for moderation, so Planck’s influence quickly waned. His son, Erwin, became involved in a resistance movement that hoped to topple the Nazis. He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Though the Planck family appealed to every ear in and around the Nazi regime that might have sympathy, Erwin was convicted and eventually hanged. (Planck survived his first wife and four of his five children).

Brown doesn’t judge Planck too harshly, though some might. He had no love for the Nazis, but perhaps too much love for Germany, its scientific achievement, and its international standing, may have made him reluctant to boldly oppose them. This led to a break in his relationship with Einstein, though the younger eminence spoke very kindly of Planck even many years later. Because of he refused to embrace the Nazis, and he was well-liked by many foreign scientists, the Allies gave him a place in rebuilding the German scientific establishment after the war. The British, French, and Americans reorganized scientific institutes into the Max Planck Society, which is still active in supporting all manner of scientific endeavor.

I think the book is approachable for most adult readers who may have an interest in Planck or his times. Brown does not get so deep so deep into the science that he loses readers; he tries to explain it in a way that will make sense to a general audience. The structure of the book may make it difficult for a young reader to follow.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Brandon R. Brown. Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.