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.

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

Card, Orson Scott. How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cincinnati, OH: Writers Digest Books, 1990.

Accomplished speculative fiction author Orson Scott Card focuses this manual on the particulars of writing science fiction and fantasy stories. It contains advice that may be useful to writers of any kind of fiction.

To start, Card tries to define the realm of science fiction and fantasy. This is difficult. Once identified as a writer of speculative fiction, you may find it difficult to get your books marketed in any other category. On the up side, within the realm of science fiction of fantasy, you can write almost any kind of story. Science fiction and fantasy is defined by a mix of marketing, reader expectation and what writers produce; something readers of these books will have a feel for, but as a new writer, or someone new to the field, its useful to know what is expected.

Something unique to speculative fiction that Card gives much attention is world creation. All fiction creates a world of sorts, but a characteristic of speculative fiction is that the world of the story is significantly different from the world we live in. A writer of science fiction or fantasy stories must have a well thought out vision for his world and how it works; he need an understanding larger than what is minimally necessary for the story. This chapter contains practical advice on what works and doesn’t in world creation.

Something that sticks out to me is found in the chapter on story construction. Card writes about where a story should begin and end, depending on what kind of story it is: milieu, idea, character or event. All stories have all of these elements to some degree, but most focus on one. By understanding what kind of story you’re trying to write, you can know where to begin and end your story and how to set up and meet reader expectations. Reading this chapter I thought of several short stories and novels that I thought were very good and saw how they fit in these categories and how the authors made fitting decisions about where they started and stopped their stories.



Card’s advice on story construction is applicable to any kind of fiction. He draws examples from speculative fiction, and has writers of it in mind as his audience, but all kind of stories could be improved with this counsel.

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

O’Neil, Dennis. The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics. New York: Watson-Guptill, 2001.

Denny O’Neil has been writing and editing comics for decades. He is particularly known for his work on comics featuring Batman. He has also written novels and taught writing.

As the title of the book suggests, the focus is on writing for comics. Comics are unique in using both words and drawings (and sometimes only drawings) to tell a story. A comics writer must write with pictures in mind and, unless he is one of those talented people who can draw well as well as write, be ready to describe to the artist the pages, panels and images he will create to bring the story to the page. Comics are inherently a collaboration between the writer and the penciller.

O’Neil’s style is very informal and is advice is direct and practical. As and insider, he can frankly lay out the difficulties of writing for comics and the expectations a writer should have.

Even so, he is quick to point to point out there is no exact formula. A comics writer must be prepared to do what works. Even in scripting, there are two major types: plot first a full script. (Editors will probably prefer full scripts from new writers). Even when writing a full script, there isn’t a standard way. O’Neil reproduces pages from several scripts. They all contain the same type of information, but they all look a little different in their particulars.



O’Neil deals with writing both the single-issue story and the multi-issue story arc. As the editor of Batman titles, he oversaw one of the most long and ambitious story arcs in superhero comics. There is an economic advantage for writers and publishers in that good story arcs can have a longer life reproduced in trade paperbacks (or even hardbacks). Even in a long story, every issue has to be good and offer a point of entry for new readers.

To some degree, what makes a good story is the same in any medium. If someone is looking for a short, readable book on fiction writing and the practical matters of keeping readers interested and managing a complex tale, in comics or other media, this book will be useful.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Golden Age of DC Comics: 365 Days by Les Daniels, Chip Kid & Geoff Spear
How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Ruth

Ruth.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Ruth is a short book with many lessons.  It takes place in the time of the judges, and in most Bibles will appear between Judges and First Samuel.  This is appropriate placement, because Ruth is an important part of the lineage of the kings who will supplant the rule of judges in the time of Samuel.

Ruth isn’t even an Israelite.  She is from Moab.  Her husband’s parents move their family to escape a famine in Israel.  The find plenty of hardship in Moab.  Ruth’s husband dies, along with her father-in-law and brother-in-law.

Her mother-in-law, Naomi, decides to move back to Israel, where she might find help from family.  She tells her daughters-in-law to return to their families.  Ruth decides to stay with Naomi.

In Israel, Ruth cares for Naomi.  She gathers dropped grain in the fields.  (It is the law that grain the falls in the field during the harvest must be left for the poor to gather.)  In the field of one of Naomi’s relatives, she is noticed by the owner, Boaz.

Boaz notices Ruth and inquires about who she is.  He is moved by the story of how she left her homeland and family to take care of her destitute mother-in-law.  He tells her to stay in his fields and follow his workers.  He even tells her to drink the water and eat the food he provided for his workers.  He makes sure she won’t be harassed and instructs his harvesters to leave behind extra handfuls of grain for her to gather.

It was the law in Israel that if a man died without children, a near relative should take her as a wife and have children with her.  This was a way of ensuring that the woman was cared for and that her husband would continue to have heirs.  After some subtle and direct negotiation, Boaz takes that role, redeeming and marrying Ruth.  It may be seen as a duty someone should have undertaken, but I think the story shows Boaz has affection for Ruth and respect for the way she stepped up to do things she was not obligated to do, even while others ignored those obligations.

This summary does not do this beautiful story justice.  I recommend reading it.  It is a short book and can be read in one setting.

It is full of lessons, too.  First, trouble falls into every life, even good people.  Ruth and Naomi aren’t presented as deserving of famine and widowhood; they are simply people who suffer hardship like all of us.

Next, God provides and has a plan.  We see God’s provision through the laws regulating harvest, marriage and inheritance that allow Ruth and Naomi to find food and eventually a place in Boaz’s household.  That God plans for these things to happen is not explicitly stated by the author, but the implication of God’s working can be found throughout the story.

Finally, God’s plans are bigger than we can expect.  The end of the tale reveals that Boaz and Ruth are great-grandparents of David.  Generations before Israel clamors for a king, God is arranging for a great one, and eventually an ultimate king who will be a savior of His people.

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STEM Books

I’ve reviewed 39 STEM-related books (and counting).  STEM is an acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  As you may have seen in the news, there is a push to improve STEM education, interest students in STEM fields, and grow the number of workers in these fields.  The idea is that these will be the skills needed by workers of the future.  If you’re a STEM educator or a student considering a career in STEM fields, you might like to take a look at some of these books.

I’ll confess that I’m not an educator, but I think most of these books will be accessible to high school and college students, and a few to middle school students.  The list is also a reflection of my career and interests in engineering, public health, policy, and history.  Even with these biases, I think it is a good list for someone looking for STEM-related books.

How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection by David F. Dufty

I was fascinated by robots as a kid.  I enjoyed reading Isaac Asimov’s robot stories.  I longed for the Omnibot 2000 in the Sears Wishbook.

Robots have come a long way.  In How to Build an Android, David F. Dufty describes the short strange life of a very complex robot made to look and talk like science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  The robot had a very sophisticated and lifelike head and complex artificial intelligence.  As with most complex things, it was the work of many people who had to solve a lot of problems.

If you’re interested in robotics, this is an interesting nontechnical book.  In addition, you’ll get introduced to some freaky sci-fi.  You may even get as (somewhat) legitimate reason to use the word “Dickhead” (capitalized, it refers to a fan of PKD, so don’t go using it on anyone).

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways by Earl Swift

The Interstate highway system in the United States is one of the most enormous structures built.  Some of the prospective STEM students who read this may actually be younger than the Intestate system, though in some sense it is never complete because it needs constant repair and maintenance.  The Interstates were completed in the 1990s, but the Federal-Aid Highways go back to 1916.

Earl Swift wrote an accessible history of the Interstates in The Big Roads.  If you interested in automobiles or transportation, it’s a good read.

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Deborah Cadbury describes seven wonders of engineering in Dreams of Iron and Steel.  It covers almost a century of history, but many of the events are concentrated in the Victorian Era.  That was a time of great technological innovation.

Though the book is history, many of the structures still stand.  Railways, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Suez and Panama Canals, and Hoover Dam stand testament to an age of big engineering.

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Though the memory of Professor Wragg’s sneer prompts me to not make this confession, part of my interest in science and technology came from comic books.  Iron Man was cool.  Spider-Man’s web shooters were very cool.  Superhero comics are full of fantasy, admittedly, but the strange, unrealistic science and technology they depict have inspired many to study STEM in reality.

Physicist John Kakalios uses examples from comic books to explore real physics in The Physics of Supeheroes.  Sometimes comics get there science right.  Even when they get it wrong, it can be instructive.  If you know what people are talking about when they refer to the “New 52,” you may find this book to be a great introduction to physics.

1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics by David Acheson

Here is another confession: I’m not especially interested in math.  I endured a lot of math classes to study engineering.  Reading David Acheson’s 1089 and All That did not require such endurance.  For one reason, it is a short book.  For another, Acheson doesn’t expect his readers to be mathematicians; it is enough to follow the outline of the math he discusses.

I recommend this book because so many people have a fear of math.  1089 can be followed by many high school students and older folks with math phobias.  Just take a deep breath, relax, and follow along as well as you can.  You’ll see that math can be interesting, useful, and even beautiful in a way.

The Brooklyn Bridge: They Said it Couldn’t be Built by Judith St. George

Judith St. George’s The Brooklyn Bridge is a short history of and iconic bridge.  Written for the bridge’s 100^th anniversary, it is also the story of the engineers who sacrificed life and health to see it completed: John Roebling and his son Washington.  John Roebling was a German immigrant who built many suspension bridges and owed a wire-making business.  He gave his son and extraordinary education in bridge engineering for the time, and before beginning work on the Brooklyn Bridge he served as an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Why should a cutting-edge STEM student read about a bridge that is almost 130 years old?  It’s because we still use and rely on very successful, centuries old technologies.  Improving and rebuilding our infrastructure will be an important part of our economy.  As recently as 2010, New York City and the federal government committed $500 million to repair and repaint the Brooklyn Bridge.

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

STEM lumps together science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Is there a difference between science and engineering?  Is it important?

Henry Petroski, a professor of civil engineering and history and author of The Essential Engineer, believes there is an important difference.  At heart, science is about increasing knowledge.  Engineering is about invention.  Of course, new knowledge makes new invention possible.  Just as often, though, engineering runs ahead of science.  Sometimes science didn’t advance until someone invented the instruments to conduct new observations and experiments.  The invention of the microscope made possible the science of microbiology.  Steam engines were built and greatly improved before we had a modern scientific understanding of thermodynamics.  In fact, thermodynamics was to a large extent born out of desire to understand steam engines. In this sense, it is an engineering science (study of manmade things) as much as a natural science (study of natural things) or branch of physics.

Petroski’s focus in the book is the importance of engineering to policymaking, where it is often overshadowed by science.  Policy, science, and engineering play off of each other a lot.  Most of my career as an engineer has been related to government, policy, and regulatory compliance.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Ghost Map by science writer Steven Johnson is the story of the birth of epidemiology.  Epidemiology is a medical science that uses statistics to help us understand how diseases operate in a population.  Using various statistical and geographic tools, long before we had computers and GIS, physician John Snow demonstrated that cholera, once a recurring plague that wiped out hundreds of thousands of people in some outbreaks, was a waterborne disease.  This understanding, initially met with much skepticism, allowed officials to intervene to prevent the spread of the disease.  For those who say of their math classes, “I’ll never us this,” here is a case where math (and science and policy) were used to make a great difference.

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

It is not much publicized today that the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 had a partly scientific mission.  Captains Lewis and Clark were charges with bringing back samples of the flora, fauna, and culture of the western territories.  It was also hoped that they would find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean.  In Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose writes about the scientific mission as well as the policy, diplomacy, and commercial hopes the expedition carried.

Of course, what attracts most people to the Lewis and Clark expedition is that it was a great adventure.  There is a place in STEM fields for thoughtful adventurers and explorers. 

Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear by Jan Bondeson

A list like this deserves something strange, creepy, and more fun than you care to admit.  Right now, thousands of very young future STEM workers are catching bugs and snakes, breaking their toys to see what is inside, or staring into space with a weird expression of vacancy and concentration.

Jan Bondeson’s Buried Alive is not a morbid book.  It is sometimes humorous, especially in consideration of topic.  From a STEM point of view, Bondeson shows how knowledge accumulates over time.  The fears and activities of our forefathers may seem strange to us, but they sometimes made sense in light of what they knew.  Buried Alive doesn’t simply play off our fascination with the grotesque and death, though the book might not have been written if we lacked that fascination, I think it reminds us to approach our ancestors with a touch of grace and humility.  Maybe our progeny will show us the same courtesy.

If you’re looking for something for a younger student, check out this post→ from Joanne Loves Science or these recommendations→ from STEM Friday.  By the way, I also write about engineering, infrastructure and the environment at Infrastructure Watch.

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Jonah

Jonah is possibly the most known prophets of the Bible, aside from Moses, because of the oft-retold story a huge sea creature swallowing him. Like Obadiah, the message God delivered through Jonah was not for Israel, but for a foreign place. In Jonah’s case, it was Nineveh, the capital of the rising Assyrian Empire.

Assyria was a rival of Israel—eventually its empire would include the northern kingdom—so Jonah was reluctant to go when God told him to head to Nineveh. Jonah headed the opposite direction, took to see, his ship was nearly lost in a storm, he was tossed overboard and swallowed. He finally gave up and the sea creature spit him out on the shore.

Jonah was a whiner. He whined about God calling to him to a place he didn’t want to go and a people he didn’t like. When the hearts of the citizens of Nineveh were changed and God showed mercy to them, he complained that this was the reason he didn’t want to go—he knew God would show mercy to a repentant people and Jonah would have preferred that they perish.

Jonah is a lot like us: disobedient, petty, vindictive, whiney, selfish. God used him anyway, triumphantly in spite of Jonah’s bad attitude. God has mercy on the repentant sinners and rebukes the haughty prophet who is supposed to be a holy man.

I recommend reading Jonah if you haven’t gotten to it. It says a lot about the character of God and men. It is an interesting short story, too. The “whale” isn’t even the most interesting part of it.

Jonah. The Holy Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Case Closed (Vol. 2) by Gosho Ayoama

Gosho Ayoama. Case Closed. Vol. 2. 1994. San Francisco: VIZ, 2004.

Case Closed is a collection of short detective stories in comic form (manga). They were originally published in Japan under the title “Meitantei Conan” (Detective Conan). That is the straightforward part.

The hero is a teenager with a genius for solving crime, Jimmy Kudo. He stumbles onto something and a crime organization poisons him. Instead of killing him, the drug shrinks him down to the size of a first grader. He commits himself to finding the men who did it. To protect himself and his friends for the criminals who think he is dead, he takes on the name Conan Edogawa (from mystery authors Conan Doyle and Rumpo Edogawa) and takes up with his unsuspecting girlfriend, Rachel, and her father, mediocre private investigator Richard Moore. To get this back-story, you’ll need to read the first volume or see early episodes of the anime series that closely follows the manga.



Other than that, the stories are straightforward tales of ratiocination in the Western tradition started by Edgar Allen Poe and taken up so well by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. For someone interested in getting familiar with manga, Japanese comics, this may be a good place to start. The mystery story is familiar to Westerners and the art is in the manga style.

This particular volume has three stories. Gosho Ayoama’s method is to present a complete mystery story and occasionally include stories that touch on Jimmy’s broader quest to return to his normal size and bring his shrinkers to justice. You don’t have to be invested in the larger story to enjoy reading the individual mysteries.

Though Jimmy appears to be a young child, and has adventures with kids from his elementary school class, the stories are not for children. There is murder and other crimes, violence and gore, and children in imminent danger. Conan has a particular knack for provoking killers into coming after him.

Judges

The book of Judges summarizes the history of the Israelite nation between the passing of Joshua and the establishment of a monarchy.  At this time, the nation was ostensibly a theocracy; the people were to follow God’s law.  The tribes largely governed themselves, occasionally even breaking into civil war.  As needed, God provided judges to provide civil and military leadership.

The people were supposed to be taking hold of their inheritance from God, both the land and the moral heritage passed down from Moses and Joshua.  However, as they mingled with foreigners and became satisfied with their possessions, they fell to temptations to idolatry and immoral living.  In the absence of powerful human authorities, such as prophets and kings, people did whatever they liked and often they liked sin.  In these times, God would withdraw his blessing from the people and allow foreign nations to overtake them.

This theme recurs throughout Judges.  As generations pass and people became satisfied, they would forget their need for God and fall into seeking to gratify themselves, with few scruples about how they do it.  God would withdraw his blessing from the immoral nation and it would fall into the hands of foreign powers.  When the people were oppressed to the end of their endurance, they would repent and call out to God.  He would send a judge who would rescue the people from their oppressors.  This would seem to be a message on God’s judgment, but it is equally about his mercy.  Suffering that brings us to God, the ultimate good, is better than an easy slide into destruction.

Some of the most famous names and stories of the Bible appear in this book.  Deborah was a prophetess and judge who was a woman leader.  Gideon famously tested God by putting out a fleece and overthrowing the Midian army with just 300 men.  The record of Samson’s feats is here, including his tragic affair with Delilah and his final triumph over the Philistines.  The story of Samson and Delilah was popular enough to be adapted to film, possibly because the suggestion of Biblical imprimatur permitted the depiction of a spicy tale.

Much of the book is devoted to the story of powerful, critical, or interesting judges like Deborah, Gideon and Samson.  The reigns of some judges are summarized in short paragraphs.  We approach history in a similar fashion now.  If some event or person was very important, exciting, interesting, strange or juicy, we might find a dozen books on the subject in the library.  Other things get a brief article in an encyclopedia, or a very short entry that Wikipedia says is inadequately documented.

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

Joshua

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The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Moore, Graham. The Sherlockian. New York: Twelve, 2010.

In The Sherlockian, Graham Moore tells two stories, both crime tales that are linked by a missing diary. In the modern story, a newly inducted member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a prominent group of Sherlock Holmes fan-scholars, sets out to solve a murder that occurs at a convention of the Irregulars. Seeking the solution to this mystery leads him to another, the attempt to find a lost diary of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes.

The second story is historical. It features Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Doyle similarly starts out to solve one mystery and gets draw into another. He sets out to discover who sent him a letter bomb that actually contains a letter, though Doyle narrowly escapes death from the bomb. It leads him into seeking the killer of young women who are joined by radical politics and an odd tattoo.

The first track reads as much like a suspense-thriller than a mystery, though the hero is decidedly nerdier than is typical of such stories, as you might expect of a guy who has had is head buried in books for years. The Doyle story begins as something similar to the stories the actual man wrote to showcase his famous character, the fictional detective
he killed to be rid of then brought back to life. It becomes more realistic at progress, or at least much messier.

Though mostly serious in tone, the book has humorous moments. The hero is a guy who has found a way to make a living from having read a ton of books. His chief credential as a detective is that he knows a lot about Sherlock Holmes. He’s not the only Sherlockian to involve himself in the case; he is simply more competent and lucky than the others.



The historical touches are interesting. The real Doyle consulted with Scotland Yard, with varying success, though the crime described in The Sherlockian is fictional. Some of his papers, including a diary, disappeared after his death and resurfaced more than 70 years later in the hands of a distant Doyle relative. A battle of words and lawyers ensued involving the would-be seller of these documents, the Doyle heirs, and a prominent Irregular. The Irregular died under suspicious circumstances and the case is still considered unsolved in spite of the efforts of police and many amateur detectives. These real events inspired the book, though the author clearly distinguishes in a short note the touch of history from the mass of fiction.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

As I get older, I start noticing some strange connections. If Peter Parker aged naturally, he’d be the same age as my father. I also learned that Chrissie Hynde, lead singer of the Pretenders (one of my favorite bands), is only three years younger than my parents. I can hardly believe it, though there is an unreliable part of my mind that seems convinced that I’m still in my early 20s.

This bit about Hynde’s age is hardly the most interesting thing in her autobiography, Reckless. You find many things you normally find in autobiographies. For instance, her early childhood in Ohio was surprisingly and pleasantly normal.

Things get more interesting in her teen years. She became a teenager in the 1960s and she was swept up into the youth culture of the time. She had two loves, music and drugs.

Hynde did a lot of drugs. She doesn’t dwell on the term addiction, but she doesn’t hide that she clearly was addicted. She subjected to herself to may dangers and abuses for the sake of getting high. A person would not do that if she was thinking straight, but addicts don’t think straight.

Unfortunately, drugs got in the way of the music. Drugs took the lives of many innovative musicians of the 1960s and 1970s, and Hynde mentions many of them that she knew. Two members of the Pretenders, Jimmy Scott and Pete Farndon, died of drug-related causes. It seems that there are several occasions in her story, before the Pretenders, when her dream of being in a band was interrupted by drugs, either her own pursuit of them or her potential bandmates’.

Hynde was adventurous. She traveled far from her childhood home in Akron to Canada, Mexico and France before settling in London. London became her home, largely because of the music scene. There she finally put together a band, though an unusual British band with an American lead. She met an amazing number of other musicians, famous then or later, who were there. It may seem like name dropping to discuss the Clash or the Sex Pistols, but these were people she knew and she lived their ups and downs with them.

The final section of the book, covering the career of the Pretenders, is surprisingly short. Admittedly, the original line-up did not last long due to the deaths of Scott and Farndon.

Hynde’s tone is not nostalgic. She has nostalgia for a Midwestern urbanism that was almost dead by the time she came along. She speaks frankly about her own days. She expresses a strong sense of agency and does not blame anyone for the way they treated her or depict herself as a victim. She seems to regret that the drugs people thought would set them free did not, and that as addicts they kept using drugs long after they knew it was a trap.

If you’re interested in rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and punk), you’ll likely enjoy this book. Hynde clearly loves this music and was around when it was undergoing much innovation. She was friends with some of the first stars of punk. He story is also an interesting section of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, she was a student at Kent State University and witnessed the protests and other events that led to the National Guard firing on students.

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

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hynde, Chrissie. Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Shut Up & Write! is a guide for new writers by author and teacher Judy Bridges. It is one of the most straightforward and simple writing guides I’ve seen, which I like. As you go through it and read about the process and techniques described, you may feel she is describing the very process she use to write the book in your hands.

There are several other things to like about this book. I’ll mention a few here in no particular order except the last.

The book is broad; it covers the writing process from idea to publication. It remains a short book, though, and doesn’t get into excessive detail. I think it is enough to have a generally direction. As a beginning writer, you should be writing and making your work as good as you can; you can figure out the details you need as you go.

Bridges doesn’t elevate fiction writing over nonfiction. If someone writes histories, news articles, technical manuals or advertising copy, they are still writing. Many of the same skills and requirements apply to any type of writing.

I like Bridges’ suggestions for organizing or plotting a story. It is very simple and visual. It is also something that could work for a short piece or a long book. Good planning tools should help one write, not spend a lot of effort on planning.

Possibly the best thing about the Bridges’ advices is that she does not sugarcoat how hard it is to write a book—at least a good one. She tells her readers to put at least two years into a book. Admittedly, many of her students and the audience for this book will be aspiring or part-time writers with limited time, but writing a quality book is about more than time. This realistic expectation will help readers who hope to write a book get in the right mindset.

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

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Bridges, Judy. Shut Up & Write! Milwaukee, WI: Redbird Studio Press, 2011.