Primates : the fearless science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas by Jim Ottaviani, Maris Wicks

Rating: WORTHY!

Louise Leakey, the renowned, if controversial Kenyan paleoanthropologist, got three things unquestionably right - he talked Jane Goodall into studying chimpanzees, recruited Dian Fossey to study gorillas, and Biruté Galdikas to study orangutans. Each of these three were each self-starting groundbreakers in their respective fields: hard-workers who contributed immensely to our understanding of these three major primates, which in turn helped us to understand both ourselves and the primitive hominids that Leakey himself was studying.

I've read and enjoyed books written by each of these three "Trimates" as Leakey referred to them, and so it might seem strange to then go on and read a necessarily limited graphic novel about them, but I admire them immensely and I found this book amusing, educational, and well-worth reading as an introduction. It's suitable for young and old alike, and so serves its purpose well. It's divided into three sections, one for each of them, beginning with Goodall, then moving on to Fossey and Galdikas in turn, including sections in between where all three meet, albeit on very rare occasions. You can find photos online of these encounters along with much material about their research.

Only Galdikas, the youngest of the three, still remains in the field so to speak, having married a "local" and taken up residence down there, and she continues her research. Fossey was murdered brutally on St Stephen's day in 1985, and Goodall is in her mid-eighties, but still an energetic advocate for chimpanzees. I enjoyed this book and commend it as a worthy read.

The Imitation game by Jim Ottaviani, Leland Purvis

Rating: WARTY!

This was disappointing graphic novel which spent too much time on the wrong topics, I felt. Plus it was too long and rambling, and tried to cover too much ground instead of focusing on the core points. That said, it did a better job than the movie of the same name, which was rife with inaccuracies, and no amount of arguing that no-one expects a painting to be a photograph can excuse some of the inexplicable changes that were made in depicting Turing's life at Bletchley Park in that movie, as engrossing and fascinating as it was in parts.

The story is of course Alan Turing's life and his World War Two work on cryptography. Both this and the movie are based on Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma, and at least this graphic novel inspired me to read that, but the biography is over seven hundred pages long, so it will be more of a skim with a detailed reading of points of interest since I do not have the time to read a seven-hundred-page book.

Alan Turing was gay during a time when gay meant something like 'party animal' and nothing more, and when homosexuality was literally illegal - and of course the punishment for a man who loved men was to incarcerate him with a whole lot of men. This made sense how? You could argue (if you were a spiteful SoB) that the way to punish male homosexuals should be to incarcerate them with women, but that seems to me like it wouldn't work either! It makes far more sense not to have it be illegal in the first place!

The art by Purvis was scrappy and unappealing to me and the text by Ottaviani was at times confused or at least confusing and lacking sharpness and clarity, so I took to skimming parts of this. Overall he story was interesting enough to make me game to consult the source rather than read this pale imitation, but as for this version, I can't recommend it.

Fallout by Janine Johnston, Jeffrey Jones, Chris Kemple, Jim Ottaviani

Title: Fallout
Author: Janine Johnston, Jeffrey Jones, Chris Kemple, Jim Ottaviani
Publisher: G.T. Labs
Rating: WARTY!

This graphic novel is a pictorial representation of events leading up to the development of the atomic bomb which was used to almost literally erase the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 and (along with the second bomb on Nagasaki) precipitate the end of World War Two. The bomb slaughtered some sixty thousand people, including twenty thousand Japanese troops, and it destroyed a munitions factory. That seems like a huge number of deaths and it is horrific without a doubt, but more destruction was rained down during Operation Meetinghouse, when the US napalmed helpless civilians in Tokyo, some one hundred thousand people died, and Tokyo was all but leveled; however, nothing has ever been built that's as fearful, as iconic, or as singularly destructive and pernicious as an atomic bomb.

This novel describes the work of the scientists who finally figured out how to bring uranium to critical mass so that it set off a chain reaction and so graphically demonstrated the immensely powerful principle of E=mc². The work began long before it was decided to use the bomb, and it was driven not by a desire to defeat Japan, but out of fear that the Nazis would develop such a weapon.

The black & white artwork is not that great, quite frankly. It's very inconsistent since it’s apparently drawn by more than one artist, and the story, believe it or not, is rather boring. How you can make a story like this boring is a mystery to me, but I had a bit of a time of it in reading this. I gave up about two-thirds or three-quarters the way through where the format changed to one featuring much more more text and a lot less imagery, in some sort of epilogue, which lost my interest completely.

The novel is quite technical in parts, which was interesting to me, but it was also boring to read an almost endless account of some aspects of the story, while other topics flashed by with barely a mention. For example, the obsession with recording the tediously on-going need to build-up a graphite barrier around the core of the nuclear reaction in early testing, was weird and pointless! Depict it and move on already! There also seemed to be some confusion about the atomic number of Plutonium - with 94 being confused with 49. Plutonium had no name back then, and was known only as a number. I'm not a physicist, but there is, trust me, a huge difference between Indium and Plutonium!

So, in short, I can’t recommend this graphic novel.