Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Now fully immunized, I feel better about being in thrift stores, even if some of them still have maskholes who don't seem to understand the concept of fully covering their breathing holes.  So let's look at what I found this week!

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A few years back, there was an excellent TV series on WGN American when they had their brief and interesting attempt at competing in peak TV.  Manhattan was about the incredibly secret, incredibly paranoid and incredibly dangerous camp outside of Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project worked to design and build the first nuclear weapons.  It was fascinating, incredibly well-acted (if you liked Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it's very much worth your time to go back and see here in this as the wife of a young physicist who literally can't tell his wife what he's doing).  I've always had an interest in the subject, so finding this book on the women who worked at on the project in a variety of roles is really up my alley.  Interestingly, this is not about the women of Los Alamos, but the women who worked at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, one of the two sites that produced fissionable material for the project (the other being in Washington state).  It was a huge project and I'm always interested to learn about a new side of it to me.

Sadly, by the way, Manhattan was only nominated for one Emmy for its two seasons.  But at least it won that one, for Main Title Design.  And hoo boy did it deserve it.

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I read so much Blish as a kid.  The thing was though, it was all of his Star Trek episode novelizations. So picking this up is something I'm doing to correct that, since he was apparently quite well regarded in his time.  I know also that in the years before his death in 1977, he also published quite a bit of science-fiction criticism under the name William Atheling Jr., being one of the earlier people to treat the genre seriously and deserving of both appropriate praise and criticism.  (They're collected in a couple of volumes that I should track down.). This is supposedly the third in the Cities in Flight series, so I'll need to backtrack.

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Look, it's Grace Jones.  I don't need to explain anything about grabbing this memoir.

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I'm honestly not sure if I've ever read The Wind In The Willows.  I remember a decent amount of the Disney movie, with it's heavily anthropomorphized versions of the characters.  But I think I'll prefer this version, where Toad is, well, actually a toad.  I mean seriously, look at him in his prison cell.

That's just adorable.

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Now this was a completely blind pickup from a Little Free Library, partially because the author is from the Portland area and her husband is the great illustrator and graphic novelist Jim Di Bartolo.  For some reason, the Pacific Northwest is a haven for comic artists and writers, with greats like Gail Simons (AKA, the Queen Of Twitter*), Matt Fraction, Kelly DeConnick, Brian Michael Bendis and others all being in the area.  (And across the border in the Vancouver area there's a lot more as well.). For all I know, this is your standard Chosen One narrative, but I'll give it a shot.

*Gail Simone has a real talent for making nerd jokes just to rile us all up and watch the carnage.  It's a gift how she does it with good humor and leaves us all waiting for guys (let's be clear, they're almost always guys) who try to "But actually..." her.  My personal favorite was the time she joked that the Punisher, a murdering maniac, should smile more, followed by one guy trying to claim she didn't know what she was talking about while showing off his shelf of Punisher paperbacks.  You're way ahead if you've already figured out that a bunch of the books were written by Gail Simone.  This gift of hers was memorialized in one of the best comics I've seen.