Atomic Habits by James Clear

Habits have a profound impact on our lives. They are behaviors we repeat, sometimes automatically, and by repetition, their effects accumulate. It would be great if our habits supported us in being the people we want to be, and if they did not reinforce things we would like to change. James Clear describes how habits work and a system for getting them to work for you in Atomic Habits.

Before working on habits, you need to work on beliefs. Beliefs always win out, and your habits are, to a degree, a manifestation of your beliefs. Fortunately, working on habits can support new beliefs about yourself. You can set up small wins that support your belief in your new identity.

You can also give yourself a break by taking the focus off goals, which can seem overwhelming. Instead, focus on systems. Focus on the things you do, especially the things you do repeatedly, that move you toward being who you want to be. Instead of noticing the gap between where you are and a goal, you can encourage yourself by noticing the progress you make.

Clear describes the process of habit formation. It starts with a cue, which triggers the brain to start a behavior in anticipation of a reward. We experience a craving, a motivation or desire for the reward. As a response, we perform the habitual behavior. Finally, we get a reward that satisfies the craving. Unfortunately, that reward may not satisfy us in helpful ways. We can take advantage of this system to reinforce new behavior patterns and interrupt old patterns.

We can take advantage of the cue by making them more obvious (to trigger wanted behavior) or making them invisible (to prevent the triggering of bad habits). We can rig the craving by making the potential reward more or less attractive. We can make it easier or more difficult to perform a habitual behavior. We can also make the reward more or less satisfying. To superpower these strategies, we can stack them.

In his book, Clear provides several ways to implement these strategies for making and breaking habits. As you develop and implement your habit change strategy, Clear encourages you to seek sweet spot. It will be challenging, and that sense of challenge can be a great motivator, but if you take on to much at once or too large a change, you are likely to experience a failure that can be disheartening. Little wins are great rewards, especially when the feel earned, so seek changes that you can realistically achieve, but that you’ll need to stretch to reach.

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

The Big Thing by Phyllis Korkki

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Changing for Good by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross & Carlo C. DiClemente

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Get Smart! by Brian Tracy

How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams

Level Up Your Life by Steve Kamb

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Small Move, Big Change by Caroline L. Arnold

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Clear, James. Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. New York: Avery, 2018.

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Clarence King was probably the most well-known American scientist of his time. It doesn’t hurt that his scientific reputation was built on exploration of the then still wild west of the United States of that he could spin a tale. Robert Wilson recounts the life of the accomplished geologist in The Explorer King.

King was born in 1842. He was raised in Newport, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

As a young man, King was enamored of art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin thought the rugged Alps of Europe to be the best subject of art for their beauty, colorfulness, ruggedness and variety. When he met western geologists and mountaineers through mentors at Sheffield, he wanted to be part of it.

He headed out for California in 1863 and became part of the state’s geologic survey. He would spend the next decade studying the geology and geography of the American west, especially its mountains. He showed great physical prowess and courage as a mountaineer.

After working on the California survey, he went on to lead surveys. In 1864, he was chosen to lead a survey of Yosemite.

He built on his reputation from the Yosemite survey to lobby Congress to fund a survey of the 40^th Parallel, roughly the route the transcontinental railroads would follow. Though it was under the auspices of the Army Corp of Engineers, it was the first federally-funded scientific endeavor that was completely staffed by civilians. While working on this survey, he was the first to discover active glaciers in the U.S. His team published new methods of silver smelting to make the mines for productive (the survey’s first report dealt with mining in order to show the commercial value of their research to money-conscious Congressmen).

The 40^th Parallel survey made King famous, though not because of the many contributions to science that came from it. King’s team heard rumors of a diamond discovery in Colorado. It would have been very embarrassing for them to have walked over such a valuable mineral resource without observing it. They tracked down the site of the discovery and determined it was a hoax; the site had been planted with rough diamonds and other uncut gemstones that the con men had bought mostly with money from their marks. Stories of massive fraud sells newspapers, especially when the names of big money men in San Francisco and New York are attached to it. King was the hero of the story.

When the U.S. Geological Survey was created, King was appointed to be its first director. His career as a scientist was already on the decline. He would turn his attention to making money in mining, but he would not be successful. He would have no money when he died.

This leads to an interesting point about King, though it is not the focus of Wilson’s biography. King had nothing to leave for his secret family. He was married to a black woman. This was a very unusual thing at the time. To protect his reputation, he kept the marriage a secret. He did not even reveal to his wife his real identity until shortly before he died (she knew him as James Todd). His friend John Hay provided for Ada Copeland Todd (and the five children she had with King) after King died in 1901.

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

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Wilson, Robert. The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Mojo by Marshall Goldsmith

Mojo, as used by Marshall Goldsmith as the concept and title of his book, is not a magical ability, though when you have you may feel supernaturally potent. Mojo is a combination of identity, achievement, reputation and acceptance. That is

-Who am I?

-What are my worthy accomplishments?

-Who do others think I am?

-Am I enjoying life now?

If you have satisfying answers to these questions, you probably have good mojo. If you lack satisfying answers, or you have no answers, you probably lack mojo and it shows in your performance, your relationships and the way you feel about yourself.

As you can see from these concepts, Goldsmith’s idea of mojo is a result of our thoughts, actions, and relationships. It is not a thing in itself, but it arises from living in a way that we find to be happy and meaningful.

Mojo is not constant. It can be lost and found. It can be too easily lost through bad habits, selfishness, bad relationships, and refusal to adapt.

Goldsmith devotes a chapter to how one can lose mojo, but much of the book is about keeping or regaining it. For each element (identity, achievement, reputation and acceptance), Goldsmith describes three or four strategies to build mojo. Some of these resonated with me more than others, as I suspect would be true of most readers. With 15 strategies, readers are likely to find at least two or three they can use. Sometimes one good idea put into practice is enough to make a great improvement.

You can have great mojo in one part of life, and less in another. Goldsmith distinguishes between professional and personal mojo. Ideally, you spend as much of your time as you can on things that are high in both types of mojo.

Sometimes you may have high professional mojo and low personal, or vice-versa. Goldsmith presents the option of changing “it” (your job or situation) or changing “you.” He doesn’t argue for one over the other. He includes examples of people who improved there mojo from both camps, those who changed their work and those who changed themselves. If you understand yourself well (identity), you should be able to make a good decision about what to change. Reading the chapter on this subject, with its examples, may give you an idea of how to approach it. It’s not an either/or choice. If you have low in either professional or personal mojo, you can make changes that lead to high mojo in both areas.

Goldsmith, Marshall, with Mark Reiter. Mojo: How to Get It, How to Keep It, How to Get It Back If You Lose It. New York: MJF Books, 2009.

Dickhead Roboticists

It appears that the fields of computer science and robotics attract a lot of Dickheads.  By that I mean fans of science fiction author Philip K. Dick.  Psychology researcher David F. Dufty is acquainted with a few of these fans, academics, engineers, and artists, who undertook the strange challenge of building an android simulacrum of their hero.  He tells their story in How to Build an Android.

Dick is possibly the best choice for an author to imitate in robotic form.  He is well known for his story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was the basis of the movie Blade Runner.  The essence of the story is that robots have become so sophisticated, intelligent, and lifelike that it is almost impossible to distinguish them from real humans.  They blow away a Turing test, and the latest models can only be identified through a test that detects their carefully disguised lack of empathy; Dick thought empathy was an essentially human trait that may not be copied by computers.  The hero of Do Androids Dream must track down and destroy these nearly human machines.

Throughout this story and others, Dick explored identity and the shrinking difference between human and machine.  People suspect themselves to be androids, androids are programmed to believe they are human, and both have false memories that they cannot distinguish from reality.  A realistic android that interacted with people in conversation seemed like a natural fit with Dick.

Of course, the project had practical implications.  It required a lifelike interface.  Artist and robot maker David Hanson believes the face is a natural way for people to interact with each other and potentially with technology.  He has made a succession of realistic robotic heads that can imitate human expression.  The PKD robot was backed by artificial intelligence developed by researchers at the University of Memphis, particularly Andrew Olney, that allowed it to understand speech and construct responses based on things Dick had said and written in life.

To top it off, something happened in the brief life of the android that would have been well suited for one of Dick’s stories.  They lost Dick’s head.  Presumably it is still out there.  It may be in some airline warehouse.  It may be on the mantle of some thief, or some flummoxed buyer of a lot of abandoned baggage.  If someone has it, they haven’t been talking about it.

The big question of the book is how do we interact with technology?  What will it look like in the future?  We will be increasingly able to make machines that at least seem intelligent and look human.  Hanson thinks that is the way to go.  The Memphis scientists and engineers, and many other like them, continue to work on interfaces capable of increasingly sophisticated and seamless interactions with people.  Are we on a trajectory from Siri to Jacosta to C-3PO to R. Daneel Olivaw?  Are androids just what we need to make technology what we need or are they too creepy?

Dufty doesn’t pass judgment.  The PKD was an interesting piece of technology with and interesting history that raises a lot of questions about what machines can be.  Even as advance and capable as the PKD android was, it had a lot of limitations.  It could carry on a conversation, in a quiet room with a patient partner, but it did little else and its responses varied from the seemingly real thing to nonsense.

Personally, I don’t think we need, nor do I want, computers with faces.  I would be pleased if I could get my Windows 8 tiles to work.  I do think the way we interact with technology is important, especially that we are able to get feedback and other information from technology in ways that helps us understand what is going on and respond intelligently.

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

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

The Essential Engineer by Henry Petroski

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

Your Intelligence Makeover by Edward F. Droge, Jr.

Dufty, David F.  How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection.  New York: Henry Holt, 2012.

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Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Jones, Gerard.  Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book.  New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Reviewing Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry makes me feel like I’m pitching a new show to the cable networks.  It’s a little like Mad Men.  There is less suavity, but plenty of smoking, drinking, and womanizing.  There is room for some gratuitous nudity.  Many of the comics publishers came from got started in spicy pulps and nudie mags.  They were hustlers from the street, too, many with mob connections.  So we can have a touch of Boardwalk Jungle, though the violence is contained to the muscular fantasies of young men wanting to overcome a sense of powerlessness.  Of course, there may be comparisono to The Big Bang Theory, especially when you have scenes of young men working side-by-side at typewriters and drawing boards, helping and competing with each other.  Most aren’t geniuses, but plenty are awkward and pretentious.  It even has a great name: Men of Tomorrow.

The book is a mostly chronological look at the development of comics.  It starts with the pulp publishers.  As the pulps declined for various reasons of economics and taste, the comics rose their peak in World War II.  Patriotic superheroes were depicted punching Hitler in the face before America entered the war.  Superhero comics declined after the war, especially due to competition from television, though other genres did well.  Some of them, especially crime and horror, attracted the attention of reformers who wanted a clean and upright media safe for children and a culture longing for conformity and peace.  Comics found a new life as baby boomers came of age, partly because of interest in new dysfunctional heroes of Stan Lee and his collaborators and partly because cheap underground comics were exploring the youth counterculture.  Finally, comics became an almost mainstream medium, especially superheroes who successfully moved into film and other media.

There are almost too many people discussed in this book to mention.  Harry Donenfeld and Jack Liebowitz built a shady distributor of sex stories and porn into a pillar of a major media corporation.  Along the way, their conflict with Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became the stuff of comics legend that occasionally broke into mainstream consciousness.  In many retellings of this story, Donenfeld and Liebowitz are demonized and Siegel and Shuster lionized.  Jones mostly resists this urge, treating the New York publishers with some fairness and showing how the cartoonists from Cleveland were the cause of some of their own trouble.  There is a host of other notables from trash publishing (Hugo Gernsback and Bernarr McFadden), organized crime (Frank Costello and Mayer Lansky), failed teachers and academics (Charlie Gaines and William Moulton Marston), and finally from comics (Charlie Biro, Bob Kane, Jack Cole, Jack Kirby, and many more).

Many of these people grew up in Jewish immigrant families.  Their successes and failures in the 1920s and 1930s, their readiness for war in the 1940s, and their search for an identity both American and Jewish in the postwar year reflects the journey of a larger community.  In addition to being a story of comics, it is a story of how Jews, immigrants, science fiction, and geeks moved from the edges of American society toward the mainstream—or maybe the mainstream widened to encompass them.

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

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

American Splendor (Film)

Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner by Michael Schumacher

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Writing: Steal Characters

A lot of writing revolves around characters. For some writers, characters are central, and they’re drives, decisions, history, and idiosyncrasies move the story. A popular series character can be the jackpot for a writer, especially a genre writer.

Great characters are all around. How do you find them? Do as your predecessors in inventing great characters. Steal them.

I’m not suggesting that you actually steal characters. Nor am I suggesting that the writers I’ll be discussing stole their characters. It’s a matter of looking around in literature and life for real and fictional people then reworking them, consciously and unconsciously, into your own character.

Let me draw an illustration. Let’s take a popular character and see how other popular characters are in some way a reworking of it. These connections are my invention. I have not idea what the creators of these characters were thinking. I doubt most of them were thinking along these lines.

Let’s start with the Lone Ranger. Created by George W. Trendle (written by Fran Striker) in 1933 for the radio, the Lone Ranger saw success in several media, especially television. Before looking at the masked strangers successors, look at his predecessors. There were white-hatted cowboy heroes before the ranger. His contribution was the secret identity and the avoidance of lethal force. These heroes were white knights transformed for the gunpowder age. You might see those chevaliers as vaguely Christianized versions of mythological questers like Odysseus and Hercules.



Now imagine that the Lone Ranger is an antihero, his bullets are deadly lead and he uses a lot of them. You might picture something like Jonah Hex. John Albano and Tony DeZuniga created Hex in 1971. He is a scarred frontiersman who roams the West, not necessarily protecting the innocent, but collecting bounties or dealing deadly justice.

Maybe you like that the Lone Ranger avoids deadly force. Let’s keep that, but make him a pulp-era vigilante. That is what Trendle and Striker did in when they created the Green Hornet for the radio in 1936. They even made the Hornet a distant relative, though not a descendant, and imitator of the Ranger. The Hornet is darker, though. Instead of riding a white horse, he drives the Black Beauty. He sometimes pretends to be a criminal, but it is mainly to allow him to infiltrate gangs and break them apart from the inside. In spite of this, he avoids killing just as his predecessor did (I guess Seth Rogan didn’t notice that).

What if the Lone Ranger was a costumed superhero? He might be Batman, created by Bob Kane in 1939. Bruce Wayne’s identity isn’t hidden from the audience, but his costumed crusade against crime could have been modeled on the horseman. Batman writer Bill Finger gave Batman a code of ethics that would have made the Ranger proud. Not only did Batman eschew deadly force, he rarely used a gun at all. In appearance, at least, Batman resembles Zorro more than the Lone Ranger. (Batman comics tie him to Zorro, too. Several authors have depicted it as the move the Waynes had just seen when Bruce’s parents were killed by a criminal). Zorro himself might be taken as a Latin American spin on the Ranger, except he was created 14 years earlier by Johnston McCulley.

Not all of these ostensible progeny are as good as Batman. Put the Ranger in a talking car and you might end up with something like Knight Rider. Put Jonah Hex on a motorcycle in a futuristic megacity and you might get Judge Dredd. (The Judge Dredd comics weren’t bad, just not my cup of tea. The Sylvester Stallone movie was bad.)

The Lone Ranger is an archetypal hero, which is how we can so easily draw connections between him and characters that came before and after. It doesn’t denigrate Trendle and Striker to say they drew on archetypes, or even specific characters or people, in creating his own character. It’s a compliment that they created a character that was so popular, enduring, and inspiring to other writers.

Think of your own twist on the Lone Ranger archetype. You might have other characters you love that you could call on. Take your favorite romance heroine and put her in a completely different setting (Charlaine Harris put Sookie Stackhouse in a Louisiana full of vampires). You could put a detective in the far future (Isaac Asimov did in Caves of Steel). Bring a dragon into the atomic age (yeah, Godzilla). You could make a dragon a slave to the boilermakers in a steampunk fantasy—hey, maybe I’ll do that.

The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, Dashiell. The Dain Curse.

The bearer of the Dain Curse described herself as being in a fog, grasping for something solid to hold on to, but finding that everything fades just as it comes within reach. Her morphine addiction might have had something to do with that.

The Continental Op, Hammett’s nameless protagonist, argues that everyone is that way. Everybody is grasping in the fog, piecing together wisps of reality from what they can pick out. He makes a similar argument earlier in the book when he avoids the truth he’d like to find and settles for a story that explains the few things he knows.

I felt like I was in a fog as I read the book. Hammett seemed to wrap up an interesting little pulp mystery, but two-thirds of the book was ahead of me. Every new clue unraveled the ties I’d made. The explanations I’d accepted no longer fit. I was reeling, as dizzy as the drug addled and insane characters in the book.



Even so, I anticipated the identity of the criminal before it was revealed. I didn’t do this through the careful accumulation of clues or rigorous reasoning. I came to me by intuition and some sense of the story’s structure. I suspected this is how the Continental Op must have worked it out, too. He stumbled upon what must have been and tied it all together with a neat explanation afterward.

Dashiell Hammett also wrote
Red Harvest
The Thin Man

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook
Will Eisner's The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

The Private Investigator’s Handbook by Chuck Chambers

Chambers, Chuck. The Private Investigator’s Handbook. New York: Perigee, 2005.

Chambers pulls back the curtain on private investigation with instructions for the do-it-yourself investigator. He also provides advice to those seeking to protect their privacy and their assets.

That is an interesting aspect of the book. In one chapter, Chambers will reveal the techniques of investigations. In the next, he’ll describe how to protect yourself from investigators. He doesn’t assume an investigator is the person in the right and the investigated is up to know good. Some one might take up an investigation to seek justice or to exact revenge, steal an identity and harass an enemy.

Many might be interested in how to protect their identity and assets. Even if you don’t need to go as far as Chambers suggests you can, you might still be surprised at the number of ways you give out your identifying information when you don’t have too. You may not need to hide anything or trip up investigators, but you don’t need to make things easier for identity thieves.

You might also be surprised about how much information about a person you can collect from public records. If you have internet access, plenty of time and a little bit of money, you can get a lot of information about a person. Finding key pieces of information opens the door for a lot more.

The tone of the book is surprisingly light, sometimes tongue-in-cheek. For instance, the first chapter is entitled, “How to Catch the Cheating Bastard.” Chambers isn’t flippant, but the occasional touch of humor and examples from his own investigations makes the serious material readable.



Chambers is careful to point out what is within the grasp of amateurs, when to call in the professionals and when to call the police. He is careful to steer reader away from activities that are illegal those some may find to be shady like pretext work (i.e. lying).

What I Read (11)

Date: February 3, 2008
Title: Changing for Good Author: James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross & Carlo C. DiClemente
Thoughts: I would like to make some changes in my life. I thought I might end bad health habits or passivity. Now I see I have issues with distress. I know a lot of my problem behavior is rooted in distress. That may be a good place to start.

Date: March 1, 2008
Title: The Physics of Superheroes
Author: James Kakalios
Thoughts: A fund way to brush up on physics I don’t think about every day. I enjoyed the tidbits of comics history.

Date: March 30, 2008
Title: The Once and Future King Author: T. H. White
Thoughts: Sometimes funny, even silly, though very tragic and sad.
There is original sin and men are depraved, as the Bible teaches. God is doing good always and seeking people to join Him. The world needs people who will faithfully try.

Date: April 3, 2008
Title: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
Author: Paul Malmont
Thoughts: This was the most fun book I’ve read in quite a while.

Date: April 8, 2008
Title: Gratitude: Affirming the Good Things in Life
Author: Melody Beattie
Thoughts: “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life” (quote from the book).

Date: April 27, 2008
Title: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Author: Michael Chabon
Thoughts: I heard a lot about this book being about comics and popular culture. It is more about identity. The superheroes and their alter egos are escaping the conventional to be their true selves, as the characters in the book are striving to be.

Date: May 25, 2008
Title: God Wants You to be Rich
Author: Paul Zane Pilzer
Thoughts: For some time I’ve shared the thought that the goodness of God results in abundant providence. I’m interested in the concept that technology unlocks supply for our limitless (ever changing) demand.

Other parts of What I Read:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5,
Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

Holiday Inn (Film)

Holiday Inn. Writ. Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice. Dir. Mark Sandrich. With Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Paramount, 1942.

Holiday Inn is one of my favorite movies. It has great music by Irving Berlin. It has performance by Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire; they only appeared together in one other movie. It’s a good romantic comedy, too. The film works in each of these areas.

Berlin originally conceived it as a showcase for his music, with a song for every holiday. He wrote the song “White Christmas” for the film and it went on to become one of the most popular songs ever. All the songs are solid and some are nearly as good as “White Christmas.” I think the song for Washington’s Birthday is the weakest, especially in comparison to the great tune for Lincoln’s Birthday, but in light of where it fits in the movie I feel like cutting it a little slack. I’m especially fond of “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

Crosby and Astaire provide good acting performance, but audiences rightly expect them to sing and dance and they deliver. Two of Astaire’s dance numbers are worth particular mention; the first is supposedly drunk and the other involves firecrackers. These two dances themselves are enough to make the movie worth seeing.

It’s a fair romantic comedy. There is a lot of chemistry between Crosby and Astaire, who deliver clever lines with snap. There is also good chemistry between them and their leading ladies, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds. The basic plot is boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl is ambivalent about ambitions, conniving friend takes advantage and sweeps away girl, repeat.

The film is an interesting look into race relations at the start of World War II. The film only has three black characters, a female house servant (played by Louise Beavers) and her two children. As if the role of cook-maid isn’t stereotypical enough, she is even called Mamie. The film plainly shows how things would have been done at the time, but seems to have slight moments of reticence about it. Here is an example.



On Lincoln’s Birthday, the white server-performers at Holiday Inn have darkened skin. The actual black people stay in the kitchen, out of sight of the guests. The song for the holiday focuses on Lincoln’s role in ending slavery. The original plan is to play it straight, but at the last minute Crosby’s character decides to change it to a blackface number to hide the identity of a starlet, his love interest, from his rivals. Even in a celebration of the end of slavery, the segregation is so complete that the white guests come no closer to interacting with black people than the make-up darkened skin of white performers.

Even so, the film isn’t about race. It’s a fun love story. It has great music and singing. It has wonderful dance numbers. It’s worth seeing, especially around Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Chabon, Michael. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. New York: Random House, 2000.
ISBN 0-679-45004-1

This novel is partly about comic books. It is more about identity, with corollary themes of family, race, nationality, sexuality, talent, profession, and self-expression.

The title characters, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, are cousins and creators of comic books during that medium’s golden age. They are fictional counterparts to the writers and artists who took elements from the popular arts of their day, explored the boundaries of a new medium, and created a form of storytelling. For comics fans, Chabon includes plenty of name-dropping and asides into the industry in that era. These elements don’t bog down the story, but fill in the background.

Joe escapes from Prague as a young man just at the Nazis are beginning to implement the isolation of the Jews there. By happenstance, he was born in the Ukraine and eligible for a Soviet passport. His family’s arrangements fail, and he is sent back to Prague. He enlists the help of Bernard Kornblum, an escape artist who taught Joe his art. Together, they smuggle the golem of Prague out of the country. Joe takes a long journey to New York, where he moves in with his aunt, Sam’s mother, and begins his creative partnership with his cousin.



Joe spends the rest of the book involved in escapes, with varying degrees of success. He tries to escape his survivor’s guilt, his grief, his hatred of those who killed his family, love, his own self-isolation.

Sam is a product of New York, an absent father and a caustic mother. He is a hustler, looking to escape poverty and loneliness, and later looking to escape the difficulties of his sexuality. He sees an opportunity in Joe’s artistic talent. Within a day, he persuades his boss, a seller of novelties, to publish a comic book; within a weekend, he manages to get his friends to produce one.

Joe and Sam are naturals to create a comic book superhero. They struggle to be and do things that seem out of their reach. They are like Tom Mayflower and the Escapist, the hero they created. Mayflower is a crippled kid who can only dream of being the great magician he longs to be. As the Escapist, he has the power do above and beyond what he imagined. Nothing can hold him. Through their creations, Joe and Sam engage in fictions that fulfill their own needs. Joe seeks revenge at first, and later seeks and reconciliation with his past. Sam seeks to end his loneliness, both his need for a father and a desire for a kind of love he could not safely pursue.

In the end, escapism becomes not just away to get a break from troubles, but a way of finding oneself. While Sam never becomes fully reconciled with his art, he finally gives himself the freedom to stop fearing and be himself. Joe embraces the comic book, and the escape it permits, as a way of both relieving the pressures of the world and to imaginatively deal with them.

• If your interested in this book, you may also be interested in The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont.