Walking on the Moon

The Lady From The Black Lagoon delivered a powerful blend of ingredients that come together to make a new, delightful tale. I was expecting a conventional biography of an underappreciated woman whose significant contributions to the movies were predictably underplayed by the various old boys networks. Lady delivers the goods here, with meticulous research of Milicent Patrick’s career. Casual fans of monster movies, like me, probably don’t know her name but almost certainly know the results of her brilliant creation: the creature design and costume from The Creature From The Black Lagoon. The confluence of studio politics, ego mania, and internalized patriarchy erased her indelible mark on the movies and a big part of Lady is an attempt to start redressing that.

Any figure who had been treated so harshly by the people in the industry she was such a big part of would be a worthy topic such a biography. That Milicent turns out to be a larger-than-life personality is an added delight. Mallory O’Meara brings her vividly to life.

But wait, it gets even better. O’Meara meshes Patrick’s story with her own story of building a new life in Los Angeles and researching the biography of Patrick. This plan is as brilliant as it is daring. It works because O’Meara composes and expresses her intertwined memoir with power, compassion, and clarity.

Her voice is a distinctive combination of confidence, honesty, and whimsy. She describes the process of learning the ad hoc methods of historical research as she works through Patrick’s story. She links that story with her own career in the same industry and how it mirrors her idol’s experiences. She also shares the ways that the experiences of writing the book prompted deep self-reflection and how it changed her.

O’Meara composes and expresses these competing threads of biography and memoir with moving panache. She is an excellent writer with a vivid voice.

A must.

The physics nerds that I know – and I know a couple – approach problems along similar distinctive pathways. They tend to try to break an obstacle down into fundamental principles, translate it into mathematics, and methodically explore the whole set of possibilities in those formulas. If your mind doesn’t work like that, it sounds like a deadly dull process.

Randall Monroe gleefully proves that idea wrong in How To.

The premise is that he approaches some simple, practical problems with a whimsically amplified version of the stereotypical physics nerd mindset. the result is an impish set of a completely impractical explorations of mathematical modeling. The trick is that he has so much fun laying out and working through these models that readers are sucked into the pleasures of analysis.

Again, that sounds much duller than it is. Anyone who is interested in math or science will find themselves quickly sucked in. I hope that people who don’t think they are will feel the pull as well.

Strongly recommended.

This is kind of an interesting beast in that it is an adaptation of two British TV episodes on a remake of a well regarded series, Civilization. Dame Beard’s focus is on how ancient art reflects humanity’s impressions of their bodies and their gods.

It does have the nature of a breezy overview that short episodic television often has. Within that framework, she makes several thought-provoking points. I also appreciated how she pointed out artistic movements and shifts that may correlate with philosophical shifts. I’m no expert on ancient art, but this has whetted my appetite to learn more.

Recommended.