Wire Mothers & Inanimate Arms: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love

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on extensive research, as I would expect from Ottaviani, including Harlow's own autobiography in both published and unpublished forms.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.

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!