November 2012: Hedy's Folly (Rhodes)

Post date: Nov 17, 2012 6:55:44 PM

Gack! I made a copy and paste error when organizing the email with directions and LEFT OUT the street address for Ros's. In spite of this, a smallish group of sturdy souls managed to gather for a discussion of Richard Rhodes book Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. All agreed that Lamarr's life was remarkable, and her self-confidence and flat out chutzpah astounding, but the book itself had problems. Mostly we felt that we just did not get enough information about the story the book purports to tell. Clearly Rhodes did not have much source material about Hedy's thoughts and motivations, and we get hardly any sense of her. He fills the book with other bits of information, some of which is very interesting indeed, but in many cases we get just a tantalizing line dropped here and there but no follow through. All-in-all we found it a so-so book about an interesting topic.