A review by nerfherder86
Hedy Lamarr's Double Life: Hollywood Legend and Brilliant Inventor by Laurie Wallmark

4.0

Hedy is one of my favorite Hollywood stars, for this double life she led: starlet by day, inventor by night. The sad part is that she didn't receive recognition until late in life. The book has great stylized art, kind of cartoony but it fits. Nice clear explanations of Hedy's "frequency hopping" invention, which she created to guide submarine torpedoes. Sadly it was never used until 1961, but today it is a vital part of cell phone and drone technology. One detraction of the book, for me, was that none of the multiple quotations from Hedy, highlighted in quotation marks and displayed in a big colorful font to call attention to them to mark various points in her life, none of them were sourced in the back of the book. There's just a selected bibliography, and a slightly self-promoting list of Further Reading About Women in STEM that includes two of the author's previous books. I really would have liked to see just a tiny little paragraph that listed the exact sources of those quotes. Picture book readers are not too young to learn that quotations come from somewhere. Sigh. Overall though, a nice book.