The Pedestriennes: America's Forgotten Superstars by Harry Hall

Rating: WORTHY!

Errata:
"May Marshall could now lay claim to the world's to pedestrienne." (p81) I don't know what was meant here.
"In June, in she quit in the middle...leaving her manager in arreareages." (p82) The first part of the sentence makes no sense, and the last word should be arrearage or better, simply 'arrears'
"Von HIllern" (p85) Inappropriate capitalization in 'Von' (should be 'von') and with the 'I' in Hillern.
"When the man persited" (p93) should be 'persisted'
"...game leg..." (p154) should be "gammy leg"
"Madame Vestras" should be Madame Vestris - Lucia Elizabeth Vestris.
Laura Keene's name is misspelled as "Keane" at one point.
"...letting loose with a torrid of cursing..." should be "torrent"
"Fueding" should be "feuding" (p190)
"Seheduled" should be "Scheduled" (p227)

The description of "Madame" Ada Anderson's feat in Mozart Garden New York covers several chapters and not a bit of it is boring. It's really quite emotional and made me feel I was very nearly there. Her achievement was incredible. It was even more incredible that within a few months of her achievement, her record would be exceeded by May Marshall, and pretty much in tandem with it, Exilda LaChappelle would exceed Marshall's new record.

If there is one thing I do love it's quirky - as long as it's not endlessly, excessively, or mindlessly so. I especially like quirky when it comes to women and things they get up to that we may, rightly or wrongly, never have imagined them doing. One thing I freely confess never did cross my transom was "...a handful of late 19th century female athletes who dazzled America with their remarkable performances in endurance walking."

The blurb continues: "Frequently performing in front of large raucous crowds, pedestriennes walked on makeshift tracks set up in reconfigured theatres and opera houses. Top pedestriennes often earned more money in one week than the average American took home in a year." Female superstars in Victorian times? Quirky that's also pedestrian? How can a body not want to read that? So off we go!

These names will be unknown to you more than likely. They were to me, but back then, they were household names making newspapers headlines. Now at least they have a web site!:

• Ada Anderson
• Alice Donley
• Sadie Donley
• Fannie Edwards
• Helene Freeman
• Lillie Hoffman
• Amy Howard
• Exilda la Chappelle
• Bertie LeFranc
• Tryphena Lipsey (aka May Marshall)
• Kate Lorence
• Carrie Ross
• Emma Sharp
• May Bell Sherman
• Bertha von Berg (aka Maggie von Gross)
• Bertha von Hillern

These women were from a variety of backgrounds and an assortment of ages from their mid fifties to as young as seventeen years old in the case of Lillie Hoffman, yet whereas Captain Barclay walking 1000 miles in 1000 hours for 1000 guineas in 1809, and falling asleep literally on his feet gets a page in Wikipedia, virtually none of the women do. Some of these endurance walkers met or exceeded his feat, such as for example, Emma Sharp. Perhaps these women faded too quickly into obscurity. perhaps genderism played a part. And not all of the men merit a page either, it would seem. William Gale, who achieved several pedestrian feats (which were not at all pedestrian!) of his own, gets no mention either, and he was instrumental in aiding and abetting female endurance walking.

A man named O'Leary kick-started the women's pedestrian competitive sport by staging a six-day marathon between two willing competitors: Bertha von Hillern and May Marshall. From then on it was a roller-caster bi-coastal ride coasting to a standstill in the 1880's and thereafter fading into complete forgetfulness until this author raised heir profile tow here it should be.

This book isn't quite ready for prime time: I found numerous spelling errors, which a good spell-checker would have cured (apart from a couple of misspelled names, that is). I know this was an advance review copy, but spelling errors should never get through even to that stage in this day and age. That aside, the book was well written, exhaustively researched, and pleasantly enlightening. It comes with extensive end notes, a bibliography, and an index. It's a fast read despite being close to three hundred pages. I recommend it.

The Story of My Tits Volume 2 by Jennifer Hayden

Title: The Story of My Tits volume 2
Author: Jennifer Hayden
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

Note that there are two authors named Jennifer Hayden, so please don't confuse them! One, this one, is the graphic novelist and artist. The other isn't! It pains me to review negatively a novel about an important topic like this, but I cannot in good faith recommend this. The title, as it did with volume one, suggests this is about breasts, and as metaphorical as it might be, it really wasn't about breasts as much as it was about the author's life, which was plagued with family issues and with health issues not only for herself, but also for her mom.

I'm not sure how much more I can say about this pair of graphic novels that I haven't already said for volume one, so this review may be unusually short for me! Please read the review for volume one to get the bulk of my views and insights, such as they are. I think my main problem, apart from not liking the art work or the insanely crowded images, was that the topics discussed here were really rather mundane - as sad and tragic as they may well have been for those persons involved, so there was nothing here for me to learn, and nothing to entertain or engross me. Volume one was better than two, but both were largely the same - a simple biography about the every day life of a rather dysfunctional family, but these "revelations" were neither unique nor particularly unusual in the big picture.

This volume covers the author's later life, post marriage, and it's really a comedy of irritations - using comedy in the Shakespearean sense. I really had little interest in these stories because there was very very little here which I have not experienced in one way or another, even if only vicariously by reading about it. In addition to his, I am not into hippie or new age stuff, and cannot take seriously books laid at the feet of a goddess or dedicated to a husband who is evidently superior not only to all husbands, but to all possible husbands. That just seemed unnecessarily unkind to me - as though everyone else's husband is second-rate at best.

This volume covers later events in the author's life, and the deaths of some family members. This is fine and I am sure it has import for family and friends, but it's nothing that other families do not go through, including my own so there is, sad and tragic as these events are, nothing to move me about these events. Death is a part of life, and it's coming for all of us sooner or later, so while we need to acknowledge that, and be prepared for it, we don't need to dwell on it or take pains to write paeans to it.

As I mentioned, the art work wasn't very good, and the images were way too crowded, and dark and insanely detailed to get the best out of them. In addition to that, there was often way too much text, which meant it was too small and hard to read at times, so I found myself skipping a lot of it because it was rambling or because I didn't want to go to the trouble of straining to read all that tiny text. That said, the writing itself, apart form being too wordy, was decently done. There were no spelling or grammatical errors that I saw, so this author can write, but perhaps needs a better topic.

I didn't appreciate the bad language in this case. I don't have a problem with it in a novel where it fits, but in something like this, it felt out of place. It could have been avoided and thereby perhaps made the message accessible to a wider audience. For me, it contributed nothing to the story, and it may keep some potential readers away. That said, this novel is explicitly about female function and organs, so maybe the language would make no difference! Some people are just too squeamish no matter what.

In short, I cannot recommend this volume because I didn't feel it was the best the author could do, or that it offered anything really new and engaging. I feel bad about this because I know there are important messages to relay about such events, and I also know that these things are important parts of the author's life, but I also think authors need to grasp that not everything that carries weight with them has the same gravity for anyone, let alone everyone else out there. I think we need to pick and choose what to relate and how to relate it, and I don't think this was the best approach.

The Story of My Tits Volume 1 by Jennifer Hayden

Title: The Story of My Tits
Author: Jennifer Hayden
Publisher: Top Shelf Productions
Rating: WARTY!

Note that there are two authors named Jennifer Hayden, so please don't confuse them! One, this one, is the graphic novelist and artist. The other isn't! I really wanted to like this graphic novel, but no matter how hard I tried, I just could not get on its side, I'm sorry to say. I think there's both a need and a market for this kind of story whether it's autobiographical, semi-auto, or purely fictional, but this autobiography just didn't work for me. Your mammary-age may differ!

I was excited to get this and volume two from Net Galley, but I had to read volume 2 first because volume one flatly refused to download until the next day, and I didn't want to wait in case it never downloaded! At first I thought maybe I should have waited, because there seemed to be parts of volume two which were dependent upon the first one for better understanding, but when I finally read one this morning, it did not clarify the things I thought it would, so in the end it made no difference that I read them out of order.

I preferred one to two, but only marginally. For me, the biggest problem was that there were no insights or points of interest in either volume for me. There was nothing really unexpected, nothing I didn't know, nothing I found fascinating, and no ah-ha moments, so for me, it did not deliver.

What I did get was too much trope and cliché for my taste. It felt like watching one of those truly crappy TV sitcoms where the wife is pregnant, and the husband can't cope, and every tired joke is tediously retold. A story like this deserved better and this one is better than those stupid, clueless, pedantic, canned-laugh shows, but it still lacked too much for it to appeal to me.

I felt really bad to feel so negative about this because it's an important subject, but I can't in good faith recommend something which I don't feel gets the job done and this one didn't, starting from the title on in. I felt that the title was slightly misleading. I do get that the title was designed to shock, to perk interest, and to be metaphorical and to show how women all-too-often feel defined by their basic physical appearance, but the story was much more about the person than ever it was her breasts. I get that for a woman, living in a male-dominated world, it can become hard to differentiate yourself from your breasts. We're mammals, defined by our milk producing ability so they are out there, so to speak, and they have unfortunately become so representative of womanhood. This is wrong, obviously, but for now, it's what we have to deal with. It would have been nice to have had more observations on, and insights into that.

For me, it was hard to empathize with this character to begin with. I think that might have been one of my root problems. She doesn't come off as very smart. She seems like a slacker with little self-motivation. She's a smoker - although commendably she gives that up, but it's because she goes on the pill, not because there's a history of cancer in her family. She didn't get regular health check-ups. Although her honesty in revealing all of this is commendable, it just didn't appeal to me or make me feel like I was on her side. If she had been more proactive, she would have been more appealing. That said, she does take more charge in volume two.

This volume deals with her childhood and youth, up to college, and meeting the guy she wants to marry, and ends with them finally marrying, but I didn't feel like there was anything new here. There was a lot of old - a lot of addressing the same issues through which everyone goes, which seemed pointless to me. It's sad to think that any of this could be news to your typical modern women, but that said, there are unfortunately too many who have not been well-educated by parents or by schooling.

I think that what I found most annoying was how over-crowded the images were. Where there wasn't too much shading and scribbling, there was too much text. I read this on an iPad, not as a print book. I don't know how large the print book would be, but the iPad screen is fairly large, yet the text was often hard to read, and I found myself skipping lots of it because there was simply too much and it was too small to bother with, and it was rambling anyway with endless asides and footnotes. It was amusing in parts, but too often tedious to read. I did get the impression that it might be more fun to listen to the author talk about this than to read what she's written about it. Maybe she should try an audio rather than a graphic novel?

The art work wasn't very good either. It was all black and white line drawings with heavy, heavy shading and overwhelming detail, and the character depictions felt more like the weekend children's cartoons in a newspaper than they did a graphic novel. I can't recommend this as a worthy read, and I take no pleasure in that.

Y The Last Man Unmanned by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Unmanned
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This was an unexpected treasure! I went to the half price bookstore to see if I could find Wayward Pines by Blake Crouch (Barty's other son, no doubt). Failing to get that, I checked out the graphic novel section and found every single one of the books I recently checked out of the library - and only those! Weird. There was however, one more tucked away deeper back on the shelf and when I tugged it out, it turned out to be the very first issue in this series! How fortuitous was that? So here, completely out of order (which is my middle name), is how it all began.

It's the amulet! Yorick's un-proposed-to fiancée seems to be having cold feet (she fell in love with a kangaroo) and Yorick is covered in Monkey sheet monkey doo-doo. Meanwhile, 355 shows up - with the amulet! The Republican desperate housewives try to run the government out of town, and Yorick's sister Hero puts in an all-too-brief appearance.

So 355 rescues Yorick from the psycho Amazons and just about everyone learns that he's, why, the last man of course! But 355 has a plan. Glad that someone does. She takes Yorick to Dr Allison Mann who is utterly astounded - to discover that a male Capuchin survived.

So this was a bit choppy for my taste - running between one group pf people and another, and then have flashbacks and flash forwards, so it was very uneven and a bit hard to follow at times. However, it was a great start and I recommend it.

Y The Last Man Girl On Girl by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Girl on Girl
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This is one of my favorite volumes. Agent 355, Dr Mann, and Yorick are on a boat heading for Japan. The problem is that Yorick is in a crate in the boat's cargo hold. He's an escape artist so he's supposed to be able to escape, but the escape was predicated on the crate being stowed the right way up with nothing on top, so Yorick is trapped. When the crate is broken, the ship's crew discovers that there is a man left alive on Earth.

The crew seems friendly, but in end are revealed to be drug runners. The Royal Australian Navy is in hot pursuit in a rickety old submarine. One of its crew, Aussie Rose Copen, is already aboard the boat, with her distinctive eye-patch, spying on the drug runners. She relays information about their location to the sub. Meanwhile, Dr Mann and 355 get it on - or at least they try to before they're rudely interrupted by Yorick.

Rose ends up in the brig and slowly, Yorick and 355 change their minds about her - and about the crew, but the captain, Kilina, sweet talks Yorick and makes herself sound less of a villain than a woman acting out of desperation. They almost get it on, but are interrupted by the arrival of the sub.

There's a brief exchange of weapons fire, but the sub wins, sinking the boat. Captain Kilina evidently went down with her ship, but most of the crew were saved. Rose asks to come with 355, Mann, and Yorick. She seems to have far more of an interest in Mann than she does in man.

Here's a writing issue from this story. The sub's captain at one point says, "That's because less accidents happen...". This is grammatically incorrect. It should be "fewer accidents", but this is someone's speech and no one speaks with perfect grammar unless they're insufferably pretentious, so in this case, bad grammar is good writing!

I recommend this volume. The writing is excellent, the plotting wonderful, and the art work great. One thing I really liked about this one was that I finally got to meet Beth, Yorick's fiancée, who turns out to be an interesting character in her own right. I don't know why the focus has been so much on Yorick and so little on her. Yes, I get that it's about the last man, not the last man's fiancée, but still, I think she's been done a disservice. I hope I'll see more of her as I read more volumes.

One thing which has bothered about this series (apart from my not being able to read it in order from start to finish!) is that not only are there pretty much only women left alive, but very nearly every one of those women is drawn in male fantasy mode: young, curvaceous, long-haired and lax morals. Why is that? I think it's because this novel was written by a guy, and he has no interest in depicting women who do not figure in his fantasies. That's something that's just not right and is the one real blemish on this entire series, for me.

Y The Last Man Kimono Dragons by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Kimono Dragons
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

I love the titles of some of these volumes. Kimono Dragons! Perfect! We start out here with Yorick, alas, looking like a reject from a remake of A Clockwork Orange. They're finally in Japan, and he and 355 are trying to track down Yorick's pet monkey (that's not a sexual as it might sound to some). Dr Mann is trying to track down her mom, but someone burned down her mom's lab - not her dog, her laboratory. Mann is with Rose and Rose is definitely with Mann.

The Yakuza is now being run by a Canadian cross between Madonna and Miley Cyrus, and it is she who has this Capuchin monkey, famous for its coffee. Or maybe not. The question is, will You who is now a purveyor of android pleasures by way of being a wakaresaseya and before that a member of the Ginza-Yonchome Koban police, actually help them retrieve & (figure it out) from the Takuza, or will she betray them?

355 has a bit of a breakdown after she realized that in order to further the mission, she was getting ready to blow the head off a young girl. Unfortunately, she hesitated and was lost. Meanwhile, both Rose and Dr Mann feel stabbing pains - and from the same Ninja katana, too.

Can the Israeli army drive their tanks to their destination in time and if so, where are they going, and what the hell are they going to do with them when they get there? Capture the twins? It takes two to tank-le! And is Dr Mann going to bleed her secret - all over the floor, as Rose once again lies - on a bed, injured? Still loving this series!

Y The Last Man Motherland by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Motherland
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

The motherland volume proceeds very much in the same mode as the earlier ones, but the characters change somewhat and the locations too, and new things are coming to light all the time - including some dark and dirty secrets, so my interest was very much maintained here.

The one-eyed Australian spy turns around and resigns from her commission out of love for the part-Chinese character, although agent 355 doesn't trust her, especially when she gets sick and starts bleeding. But then agent 355 doesn't trust anyone, and makes short work of a ninja girl who is rather full of herself.

We get to meet the Israeli navy, such as it is - or rather, I guess, a rogue portion of it. The commander of the boat claims she stole a battleship, but the boat looks more like a cruiser or a patrol boat than ever it does a battleship.

The art work is simple but very functional and very well done. Even the animals get a fair shake, as attention focuses in this issue upon Yorick's pet Capuchin monkey, which the group is trying to get mated to a suitable female without much success. Since I was reading these out of sequence I wasn't sure what the point of this was. Yorick was certainly deeply interested in the monkey's welfare, however! Another volume that's a worthy read.

Y The Last Man Paper Dolls by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Paper Dolls
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

Paper Dolls is another in a rather random sampling I made of this series perforce, since the library didn't have the whole set! Having read a few volumes, though, I do want to read the whole set now. It was in Paper Dolls where I first met the crew of the submarine which has abducted poor Yorick, alas, and is transporting him around the world. We get to know Yorick's pet monkey and stage assistant, named & (figure it out!). The monkey is the key to what's going on here. We also get an origin story for the secretive but highly-effective Agent 355. Yorick continues his forlorn quest to find out whence his fiancée Beth has disappeared (Hint: she;'s somewhere in Australia, supposedly.

This is where his naked picture is published in a tabloid newspaper, supposedly proving that there's at least one guy still alive on Earth - although who will believe it? It also introduces us to the pregnant one and to a weird-ass religious order (one of several we'll meet in this series.

The writer's and artists' willingness to show a full-frontal nude male is refreshing. Usually in these kinds of comics, they show the female in all her glory while hiding the naughty bits of the male. In this series, they seem quite unwilling to show females, yet unabashedly show Yorick's particulars. Go figure.

I liked this comic because it keeps unveiling the story. It's like one of those giant theater curtains which keeps on drawing back, and drawing back, and you start to wonder if and when it will ever stop! I recommend this one.

Y The Last Man Ring Of Truth by Brian K Vaughan

Title: Y The Last Man Ring Of Truth
Author: Brian K Vaughan
Publisher: Warner Bros
Rating: WORTHY!

Penciler: Pia Guerra
Penciler: Goran Sudžuka
Inker: José Marzán Jr
Colorist: Zylonol Studios

This is a series I stumbled onto at the local library (yeay libraries!) which unfortunately did not have issue one to hand, so having perused a volume and decided I liked it, I decided to take the plunge with the series "in progress" as it were, and I wasn't disappointed in the first volume I read, which was Paper Dolls. Yeah, it sounds like a novel by John Green, but this novel makes John green with envy, and having read it, I think I can say that you don't absolutely need to have read previous volumes to enjoy it, but it helps for background! Having read this one I did want to start the series over, it was that good and that engrossing.

For a series written by a guy about the one lone remaining guy in the world after a plague wipes out all (or as we later discover, very nearly all) human males, it's not what you might think. While the context is adult in nature, it's not x-rated by any means, although there are adult situations and some violence, which is relatively mild by comic book standards. The published graphic novels in the series are these:

• Unmanned
• Cycles
• One Small Step
• Safeword
• Ring of Truth
• Girl on Girl
• Paper Dolls
• Kimono Dragons
• Motherland
• Whys and Wherefores

I started from volume five and read through volume ten.

Why it took a guy to write this I don't know. Why some female graphic novel artist/ author (and there are a lot of you, I know, despite popular perceptions!) couldn't man up is a good question. Yes, I'm kidding with the man up comment, but I'm very serious about why a guy wrote this. Is there a female writer who wants to write the one about the only female left on the planet? It needs to be done! I'd be happy to write it with you if you're interested.

So Yorick, alas, is one of the insignificant, yet highly significant few men remaining alive, and all he wants to do is get back to his fiancé, Beth, who is somewhere e=doing walkabout in Australia. Unfortunately, when he finally talks the crew of the submarine in which he's traveling almost like a prisoner, into letting his look for her, it turns out, so he learns, that she's gone to Paris to find him!

Here's a writing issue that I see frequently in books and movies, and on TV, and which also appears here: "My name is Sister Lucia Ober..." (p88) - no, that's her title and her name! Unless she was actually named "Sister" by her parents, then her name is Lucia Ober, her title is "Sister". OK, pet peeve off.

Sister Lucia is delusional, and I'm not talking about her belief in a god, although that's one problem. She thinks that the Catholic Church pulled people out of the dark ages when it actually dragged people down into the dark ages - and is still trying to hold them there today!

There's unintentional humor, too. A tone point one character says, "There's a reason the best rock climber sin he world are all women" - well in a world where there's only one or two men left, I imagine the best rock climbers are all women!

I found it odd, and not a little affected that the speeches for people in the flashbacks were all in parenthesis. It was annoying, but not a killer, and the rest of the novel was great: nice writing, good humor, cool action, lots of interesting characters, and really good art work, so I recommend this volume.

The Girl Who Played With Fire Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti, Antonio Fuso, and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill, and Lee Loughridge.
Letters by Steve Wands.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

The graphic novel again relates Steig Larsson's original story faithfully and while there's just as much violence in this volume, there's no sex at all worth the mention. I don't know why, but the art work here didn't grab me like it did in the first two volumes. I was nowhere near as fond of the rendering of Lisbeth here as I was in the previous outing, but the art was very workman-like and got a complex job done. It just didn't leave quite the same pleasant taste the previous material did. One notable exception (illustrated on my blog) was the full page rendition of Lisbeth's dragon tattoo, which I thought was really good.

The lettering felt better in this one than in the previous volumes, and it seemed a better reading experience to me for that. Maybe I was just more used to it this time after reading two previous volumes? On this topic, I was amused where we saw one frame of a report which was actually information about a software license, but imaged with the lettering backwards! Later we get a news report, but if you look at it. It consists of the same paragraph repeated over and over again.

We do get to meet a member of the Evil Fingers punk band which is mentioned in the book, and which is now a group of female friends who are close - as close, that is, as Lisbeth would ever let anyone get. Lisbeth was never in the band since she's tone deaf, but she was part of the post-band gatherings. It doesn't specify the name of the band member who is interviewed. We know it's not lead singer Cilla Norén, unless she's changed her hair completely and lost a lot of weight, yet that's the band member whom officer Faste interviewed in the novel.

So, to sum up, I didn't like this quite as much as I liked the first book (which was in two parts), but I still think it's a worthy contribution to the canon. I am looking forward to, and hoping for, the third volume to be completed.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 2 Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 2
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill.
Letters by Steve Wands and Lee Bermejo.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

Again, as with volume one, I was impressed with this. Denise Mina's writing covered everything of import, but also kept the pace tight. Steve Wands's and Lee Bermejo's lettering was nothing spectacular, and a bit on the small side. Obviously you can't hide the image under large blocks of text, but for me, and especially in this era of e-comics, lettering is nearly always a too small. I was glad I read this in print form as opposed to on an e-pad. What impressed me were Giulia Brusco's and Patricia Mulvihill's colors and Andrea Mutti's and Leonardo Manco's art work which continued the same standard set in volume one. The covers were excellent in quality, but as I mentioned in the review of volume 1 thought that the cover for part 2 didn't capture Lisbeth Salander. The face was wrong, somehow. The interior artwork captured her magically.

The hilariously squeamish depictions of nudity continued. I found it curious that there were no-holds-barred when it came to violence, but that genitalia were deemed too horrific to show! One of the most important scenes - the rape of Lisbeth Salander, was glossed over a little too conveniently. We get the full gloory of the headless cat, with its bloody entrails all over, yet a central event of the brutal rape of a woman is deemed inappropriate?

Nothing overt was depicted except blood and strongly implied violence. A sheet strategically covered her butt crack afterwards. Seriously? If you're going to show the violence, then show it, don't blow it. If all you feel you can show is blood spatter, then don't show anything. This part made no sense because it robbed Lisbeth of the full horror of her torture. I didn't get the point of a graphic novel that's inconsistently graphic! Why the artist would baulk at that, and not at blood spray and cat entrails is weird to me.

That gripe aside, I really liked this overall, and I recommend it. I'm certainly going to buy it if I get a chance.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 1 Adapted by Denise Mina

Title: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Part 1
Author: Denise Mina
Publisher: DC Comics (Warner Bros)
Rating: WORTHY!

Art by Andrea Mutti and Leonardo Manco.
Colors by Giulia Brusco and Patricia Mulvihill.
Letters by Steve Wands and Lee Bermejo.

I already reviewed this novel so what's up here? Well I originally read this in print book form. Later, I listened to it in audio book form, so now it's only right that I check out the graphic novel too, right?! That's why this review is shorter than I normally write. I'm not going into any details of the plot since I've been there and done that, and you can get those from my original review. This review is all about the graphic side of things.

So I was very impressed with this work. It's been somewhat updated from the original novel to include smart phones, for example, but otherwise is faithful to it. Denise Mina's adaptation was sparse but covered everything that was important, and kept the story moving at a clip. Steve Wands's and Lee Bermejo's lettering was pretty much boiler-plate comic book, so there was nothing there to praise. On the downside, lettering is nearly always a little too small for my taste, especially if you're trying to read it on a screen, such as an iPad. I'm glad I read this in actual print form. It would have been annoying on a pad. What impressed me were Giulia Brusco's and Patricia Mulvihill's colors and Andrea Mutti's and Leonardo Manco's art work. Both were excellent for my taste and really brought the story to life. The covers were excellent in quality, but I thought that the part 2 cover really didn't capture Lisbeth Salander. The face was wrong, somehow. The interior artwork captured her magically.

I was amused by the depictions of nudity (and almost every eligible female gets nude in this graphic novel, even young Harriet, whereas only one guy does). The amusement came from the apparent squeamishness of the artists to depict genitals and butt cracks! I've never understood this, especially when violence is depicted without a single thought to covering it up! Are we to understand from this that our society believes that looking at something sensuous and beautiful is verboten, whereas violence is cool?>/p>

To me breasts are far more out there, provocative and 3D, than ever female genitals are, so what's with the shyness? We got mammaries a-go-go, but whenever there was any danger of a vulva heaving into view, there was always something in the way: panties, or a judiciously draped sheet reminiscent of the wispy gauze which inexplicably floated around in classical paintings of nudes. The same applies to male genitalia.

So, overall, I highly recommend this - especially if you haven't read the original. It's a great introduction to the first novel of the trilogy, but the cost, I have to say is pretty steep. It's forty dollars for both of the volumes which make up the first novel, so you might want to get this from your library before you decide to buy, or look for it used. I would definitely like to buy these two.

The Hillary Doctrine by Valerie M Hudson and Patricia Leidl

Title: The Hillary Doctrine
Author: Valerie M Hudson and Patricia Leidl
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Professor Valerie M. Hudson holds the George HW Bush Chair at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, and has written several books. Patricia Leidl is a Vancouver-based international communications advisor who has worked with USAID.

I recommend reading his. I’d call for it to be required reading except for the fact that it’s written more as an academic paper than it is for popular reading, and it’s really quite long (430 pages, although that’s reduced to 308 pages when notes, prefaces, forewords, etc (which I didn’t read, as is my ‘doctrine’!) are excluded. Also, it's very densely-packed with information. For me this wasn’t a problem because I enjoyed reading this and educating myself. For others it might feel rather more like cramming for finals than reading for some other purpose!

Let me start with a disturbing revelation: “The United States is also one of only three nations worldwide that has not legislated any paid maternity leave whatsoever, the others being Papua New Guinea and Swaziland.”. I can’t say anything about Swaziland, but I know that Papua New Guinea has a rape problem of terrifying proportions, which I shall get back to later. Note that another perspective substitutes Oman for Swaziland (I don;t know which is right, but it doesn't make it any better for the US! US, Papua New Guinea, Oman are only nations without paid maternity leave - UN. Indeed, the US is hardly family friendly: The U.S. ranks last in every measure when it comes to family policy, in 10 charts

So this is what women in the 'land of opportunity' are up against. As the book blurb says, “Hillary Rodham Clinton is the first Secretary of State to declare the subjugation of women worldwide a serious threat to U.S. national security.” This is what the Hillary Doctrine refers to, and what this book investigates, looking at both the positive and the negative perspectives. How much more of a threat to security is it when those subjugated women are resident in and citizens of the USA itself? The conclusions may well disturb you as they disturbed me. The book references Hillary Clinton's speech at the Fourth World Conference on Women, organized by the United Nations, in 1995 in Beijing. It's well worth the listening, although I felt that the book over-dramatized it somewhat.

This books asks many disturbing questions which need to continue to be asked until we get useful answers. One of them is: “Does the insecurity of women make nations less secure? How has the doctrine changed the foreign policy of the United States and altered its relationship with other countries, such as China and Mexico?” It incorporates views from a wide assortment of people, both favorable and not, and considers studies conducted in nations from Afghanistan to Yemen. It also considers how the US actively undermines its own gender policy with its own agenda policy.

Clinton, the most widely-traveled of all US Secretaries of State, who was a republican before she switched sides many, many years back, has pretty much been a lifelong advocate on women’s issues, and never so strongly as when she became SoS (for women!) for four years under the Obama administration. “I believe that the rights of women and girls is the unfinished business of the 21st century. We see women and girls across the world who are oppressed and violated and demeaned and degraded and denied so much of what they are entitled to as our fellow human beings.” This is what she told Newsweek magazine.

After Beijing, Alyse Nelson, president of Vital Voices Global Partnership said, “What Mrs. Clinton so clearly realized in Beijing was that she had a voice and she had power, and she could use that voice to help those who had no power.” There are far too many women in this world without power, without equal rights, without food in their bellies, or clothes on their backs (or too many clothes covering them up and hiding them from sight), and without even a basic education in their brains.

Curiously, Clinton herself has had something to say about Papua New Guinea: One of her highest priorities was “…enabling more women to have access to their rights, to take their position in society” and after a short visit there, she announced her intention to have a trusted aid follow up in that nation where almost incredibly, some 55% of women have experienced forced sex.

I highly recommend this book, sad as it made me to read it because of the god-awfully distressing facts that it piled up inescapably.

Suffrajitsu Mrs Pankhurst's Amazons Volume One by Tony Wolf

Title:
Author: Tony Wolf (no website found)
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!

Emmeline Pankhurst was a radical political agitator for women's suffrage and women's rights. She founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) which actually established a jujutsu-trained all-female squad of bodyguards to protect her from police assaults. This graphic novel, for one price but in three parts, takes that and runs with it.<.p>

Drawn very much in the old-style of the golden era of comic books, the illustrations are evocative, well-done and rather nostalgic which makes them engagingly appropriate for the subject matter. Emmeline Pankhurst was a wild and crazy girl, and this captures that and the spirit she represented very much.

The comic is very short, only 24 pages total, which makes for a fast read, but of course for those who buy the story, there are two more episodes to come included in the original purchase price (as I understand it). One issue I took with it is that it suggests that the bodyguards were trained in Bartitsu, but this was not the case since that very personal art, invented by Edward William Barton-Wright (who is, as far as I can see, is depicted as the trainer and who was very nearly the same age as Pankhurst), largely went out of style in 1902. This is the art featured in a Sherlock Holmes story and named (or misnamed) 'Baritsu'. Suggesting it this way is actually an insult to the real trainer of the WSPU bodyguards, which was a woman named Edith Margaret Garrud. Why she was snubbed in favor of a guy in what is otherwise a strongly feminist novel, I don't know other than that the author is a proponent of Bartitsu!

The novel is set in 1914 and this too, is problematic because the WSPU ceased operations during World War One for the sake of national unity against the German threat to sovereignty and freedom. The war began in late July 1914, so the events depicted here could have taken place in the earlier part of that year, I suppose!

A charming variety of characters are included, some fictional, others not. Persephone Wright is a fictional woman of ill-repute, a “fallen woman”. Flossie Le Mar is an homage to Florence LeMar, who actually was a practitioner of jujutsu. Katharina Brumbach really was a wrestler and strong-woman. Toupie Lowther was also a real person, an avid motorist, and a practitioner of jujutsu. Judith Lee appears to be an invention of writer Richard Marsh. Kitty Marshall, a fictional quick-witted teenager and a Miss Sanderson a violent fictional character. It's doubtful this group (fictional or otherwise!) ever met.

That aside, I really liked this novel and I recommend it. Issue one features the Amazons’ conflicts with the London and Glasgow police and is out as of the date of this review. Issue two follows a month later and covers "a daring rescue mission in the Austrian Alps" (over which Toupie Lowther actually rode on a motorcycle). issue three comes out a month after that and depicts the Amazons trying to prevent a terrorist attack. Is it this that will precipitate World War One?! A ripping good yarn - and somewhat educational too!

How to be a Woman by Caitlin Moran

Title: The Dragon Business
Author: Caitlin Moran
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!

My blog is nearly all about fiction - writing it, reading it, watching it, but once in a while I blog non-fiction. In this case, I'm assuming that this is mostly non-fiction, but I admit that sometimes I wondered, because this novel/biography has the same issues that I have with first person PoV fiction: how can the narrator possibly recall all these events in such detail?

It's not possible for someone to recall conversations not only word-for-word, but also the nuances attached to those words. At best you can have an impression, which may not even be accurate, of an exchange, and that's what I'm assuming went on here. Even if you keep a detailed diary, it's never that detailed! Even if you wrote the conversation down shortly after it occurred, you can't recall it that precisely. That said, this book was endlessly entertaining, enlightening in some parts, and LoL hilarious at times.

There were some portions which fell flat for me, but very few. It helped that Moran is British so I had many common reference points with her which may be lost on American readers, although some of her writing is surprisingly mid-Atlantic. Maybe the UK has gone over to the American side a lot more than it had when I lived there.

Essentially, this story is highlights (or low-lights if you like) from Caitlin's (real name Catherine, pronounced Catlin - you'll have to read it to figure that out!) youth to the present (present when it was written, of course!), but with the focus tightly on feminine issues. She begins with her period making her see red, followed closely by public hair (well, it was pubic, but it's not now she's written a best-selling book about it...), and from there she rants on about breasts, feminism, bras, panties, obesity, genderism, love, marriage, abortion, role models, and fashion.

I highly recommend this. It beats anything else that I've ever read on feminism, and it has some new and interesting points of view to share.