Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow And The Science Of Love [Paperback]

Jim Ottaviani (Author), Dylan Meconis (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2007

"Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit on your lap. ... The end result is a happy child. Free as air, because he has mastered the stupidly simple demands society makes upon him." Psychologists know best, of course, and in the 1950s they warned parents about the dangers of too much love. Besides, what was 'love' anyway? Just a convenient name for children seeking food and adults seeking sex. It took an outsider scientist to challenge this. When Harry Harlow began his experiments on mother love he was more than just outside the mainstream, though. He was a deeply unhappy man who knew in his gut the truth about what love -- and its absence -- meant, and set about to prove it. His experiments and results shocked the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This nonfiction graphic novel retelling psychologist Harry Harlow's famous experiments is as disturbing as it is excellent. We'll show you what love looks like—and what it does, says the young researcher, as he turns to TV to make his case after regular scientists reject his experiments. Harlow showed that rhesus monkeys preferred the soft, cloth stuffed-animal mother over wire surrogates, even when nursed by the wire doll. The famous images of the scary cloth mother and the even scarier wire mother has great cultural weight, but the real drama of the story Ottaviani tells is the contemporary scientists who won't admit the word love into their clinical language. Harlow's journey is tinged with subtle class and immigrant issues—the big-jawed, jowly figures, drawn with meaty shadows, express these divisions wonderfully, and help give Harlow emotional weight as he simultaneously finds success and sinks into alcoholism. The repetition of the term proximity, how scientists explained away love, is chilling, and the largely forgotten Skinner boxes and the theories behind them give the work a sense of deep foreboding as a cautionary tale of how behaviorists once tried to declare affection to be scientifically unsound. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

About the storytellers: All of Jim Ottaviani's books have been nominated for multiple awards, including Eisners & ALA Popular Paperback of the Year, and they also receive critical praise in publications ranging from The Comics Journal to Physics World to Entertainment Weekly to Discover Magazine, and get national broadcast attention in outlets such as NPR's Morning Edition and the CBS Morning Show. Dylan Meconis was an original contributor to the groundbreaking Flight series and a nominee for the Friends of Lulu Kim Yale award. She is also a launch contributor to Girlamatic, a member of the Pants Press collective and Mercury Studio, and has been blogged just about everywhere.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: G.T. Labs; 1St Edition edition (July 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097880371X
• ISBN-13: 978-0978803711
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,051,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jim Ottaviani has worked in news agencies and golf courses in the Chicago area, nuclear reactors in the U.S. and Japan, and libraries in Michigan. He still works as a librarian by day, but stays up late writing comics about scientists. When he's not doing these things, he's spraining his ankles and flattening his feet by running on trails. Or he's reading. He reads a lot. Elsewhere on the web you can find him at www.gt-labs.com .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Graphic-nonfiction!, March 15, 2008

By 

Timothy Capehart "Review-a-holic" (Dayton, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow And The Science Of Love (Paperback)

The topic of this graphic nonfiction sounded interesting from a pre-pub review I read. At a library conference I visited the publisher's booth and got a copy signed by the author. While stuck in the airport, I started reading this...and couldn't stop. I read it twice through on the trip home. When I got home, I made my father (who's more of a scientist than I am) read this too.

I don't have a degree in "real" science (writing and library science,) but I have always been interested. I do read a lot of graphic novels. This is graphic non-fiction as it should be done. In fact everything from GT Labs is worth your time and your dollars. All of GT Labs publications might not be great, but this is. The art is well done. The story is compelling. The information is well integrated into the story. Excellent!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A nuanced, educational, and entertaining graphic novel, July 8, 2009

By 

oldtaku (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow And The Science Of Love (Paperback)

I really don't understand the hugely negative reviews for this. It's based on extensive research, as I would expect from Ottaviani, including Harlow's own autobiography in both published and unpublished forms.

'Wire Mothers' takes you through a tour of Harry Harlow's lab just before the famous CBS 'Mother Love' episode of 'Conquest'. At this time, B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning theory was king - everything and everyone was a black box, to the point that you don't even really comprehend or understand the words you are uttering - you are just regurgitating patterns you were trained in as a child. Love or affection were meaningless, because such concepts are null concepts to mindless automatons. It was the prevailing climate of the day, as strange as it sounds now.

Harry Harlow thought this was ridiculous, so he engaged in a series of now painful to contemplate experiments with baby rhesus monkeys where he provided them with wire 'mothers' with bottles (food) and wire mothers with plush carpet skins (affection) or raised them with no mothers whatsoever, then subjected them to various stresses to see how they'd react. As the afterword says, this is cruel, but someone 'had' to do it and by the standards of the day it was no worse than subjecting minerals to acids.

I really thought this was quite sympathetic to Harlow. He's pictured here as a nuanced, conflicted, but principled David who beat down the B.F. Skinner Goliath of the day with a simple, yet utterly compelling series of experiments. The presentation is clever, the art is appropriately realistic yet stylized. It portrays him as a very (likeable) human being, which I guess isn't acceptable to people who need everything to be in broad swathes of good/evil white/black paragon/fiend. But science is never so clean. Really, if you were going to complain, it should be about the caricaturization of Skinner and Watson (even though it's accurate!).

This and all of Ottaviani's books are excellent windows into the real world of science, if you can handle it, and I'm sorry that I waited so long to read this because I stupidly trusted other reviews. I read about this in psychology classes, of course, but it never really hit home so well until now.

Honestly, if I have any complaint at all it's that this is 'only' 80 pages, so for $10 you get a single concept well elucidated instead of 300 pages of dense text, but there's something to be said for quality.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Oh, Mama!, August 26, 2011

By 

Jean E. Pouliot (Newburyport, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow And The Science Of Love (Paperback)

This graphic novel approach to telling the story of Harry Harlow is wrong in so many ways. Harry Harlow is a strange choice for enshrining in a book. A punster, loner and weird guy, he tried to study "love" by depriving monkeys of maternal touch. His sickish experiments literally drove some animals crazy. Ottaviani's story telling was weak and confusing. He seems to have a hard time crafting a narrative that might interest readers. Harlow's depression hardly came across to me until I read a Wikipedia article about him. Finally, Harlow's experiments don't seem to have gotten to the bottom of what love is - except in the mind of this disturbed man.

Horrible subject, uninteresting story, badly told.