Full review at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books 
 The Secret History of Wonder Woman is an absolutely fascinating non-fiction book about the man who created Wonder Woman and the many women who inspired him and who, in many cases, directly contributed to Wonder Woman in concept, story, and design. It's also a history of feminism from the suffragette movement into the 1950's (it touches briefly on the 1960's and 70's but is primarily devoted to early feminism). 
 I dragged my feet a bit about reading this book because I had just finished another book about the history of Wonder Woman. Tim Hanley's excellent Wonder Woman Unbound was a pretty extensive overview of Wonder Woman from the first comics to the present day, and I was afraid that The Secret History would be redundant. It isn't, because instead of trying to track Wonder Woman across her entire existence, the author focuses on Wonder Woman's origins, which means we get to hear tons of great stuff about the suffragette movement, the battle for birth control, bohemian attitudes towards sex in the Roaring 20's (including Marston's complicated ideas about bondage), and women's struggles to balance motherhood with careers. 
 I found this book to be an amazing page-turner, full of fascinating detail. Although I like reading non-fiction, I usually read it much more slowly than I read fiction. The fact that I read this rather large book in about two days is a testament to how entertaining and interesting it is. The book talks about women's struggles in universities and workplaces, women trying to balance family and work, and women in comics (as characters and as writers and artists). It briefly addresses the racism in Wonder Woman, pointing out that it was no better or worse than it's contemporaries (which is to say, awful). Marston wrote several other pieces condemning racial prejudice and anti-Semitism, and it's a terrible shame that these attitudes did not make in into the pages of Wonder Woman. 
 - Carrie S.