Reading Journal: The Wolf in Winter; The Secret History of Wonder Woman

When they separated again she was gone.
John Connolly, The Wolf in Winter (Atria, 2014).

This is the 13th in a fine series by John Connolly about private detective Charlie Parker in Maine.  Parker is a driven man, ferreting evil out wherever in Maine he finds it (his wife and child were killed by a madman), even when it means chasing demons.  In The Wolf in Winter he is investigating the murder of a homeless man whose daughter has disappeared and traces the daughter to Prosperous, Maine, where the good citizens have made a pact with the devil, or something like it.  The book follows Connolly's unusual method of first-person narration by Parker alternating with third-person narration of what is going on in the town, controlled by a priest of the Family of Love.  Connolly effectively keeps the occult to a minimum while drawing vivid portraits of Parker and his suffering as well as details of the lives of the down-and-out in Maine and the desperation of small towns.

There was plenty of feminist agitation in the 1940s in the pages of Wonder Woman.
Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf, 2014)

I grew up in a small town without a bookstore or library and, like many kids hungry for narrative, I read comic books.  I had no access to books (my parents said they were bad for your eyes) and little money but I could afford comic books, then priced at twelve cents, and I particularly loved Batman and Superman; at that time, in the fifties, Wonder Woman had been domesticated and had little appeal for me.  So I found Lepore's book fascinating, as it showed how William Moulton Marston invented Wonder Woman as a strong hero in 1941 and wrote her comic books until his death in 1948, after which her Amazonian qualities petered out.  Marston was a psychologist who invented the lie detector and lived with two women, both of whom bore children.  Marston hired his own artist, Harry G. Peter, though Lepore does not discuss the artistic aspects of the comic books to any significant extent; she is much more interested in its themes as they merged from the suffragette movement and the efforts of birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger, whose niece was a member of Marston's household.

Unfortunately Wonder Woman and other comics met a great deal of opposition from adults and were gradually relegated to obscure venues; when I was a kid you could get them on any newsstand or at any candy store.  They were an introduction to reading -- often with complex plots and intelligent themes -- that today kids seldom get, and we are the poorer for that.

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