Feynman

May 30, 2011
Jumping from the Manhattan Project laboratories of Los Alamos, N.Mex., to the beaches of Rio, Ottaviani and Myrick's portrait of the Nobel Prizeâwinning physicist and general polymath Richard Feynman eschews chronology in favor of rhythm, and it's an approach that suits their subject perfectly. While Feynman's role in the creation of the atomic bomb and his contributions to 20th-century quantum electrodynamics are fascinating topics, they share equal time with his vaguely libertine (for a physicist, anyway) approach to romance and his tirelessâand unevenâattempts to understand such nonscientific pursuits as art, language, safecracking, samba music, and cooking. Though he was indisputably one of the leading figures in the post-Einstein scientific landscape, Feynman's most enduring pursuit was making physics accessible to the layman, and several sections of the book illustrate how this impulse went beyond mere populism and came to dominate his scientific life. When he wasn't relaxing on the beach, he frequently chose teaching freshmen or lecturing to the general public over pure research. Myrick's light, sketchy inks keep the proceedings from bogging down, even in the lecture hall, and an extensive bibliography and sketchbook prove that the most dogged intellectual pursuit can still be a good time.

May 15, 2011

Ottaviani's Two-Fisted Science includes several anecdotes drawn from the remarkable life of Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918-88). Those incidents are repeated here, woven into a full-length biography of this brilliant, irreverent, and insatiably curious man, moving from his early years when his father encouraged his interest in science, to his recruitment into the Manhattan Project, and on through his groundbreaking work in quantum electrodynamics and his career as a Caltech professor. Along the way, he also became a safecracker, a samba percussionist, the godfather of nanotechnology, and the key investigator of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. VERDICT Ottaviani casts Feynman, a renowned raconteur, as narrator of his own story and reveals his expansive personality and his inner emotional life in a wealth of well-chosen details and anecdotes--most movingly in an account of Feynman's despair in the wake of his first wife's death and the horrible destruction caused by the atomic bomb, and how the simple fun and joy he found in science helped him move on. A fine introduction to a great character; recommended for teens and adults.--S.R.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2011
Ottavianis third graphic novel about physics is the most personable yet. A smaller-scale work than Fallout (2001), on the Manhattan Project, and Suspended in Language (2004), on Niels Bohr, its a biography of American physicist Richard Feynman (191888), who became famous beyond scientific circles with his popularly pitched books on his life in physics, his showmans persona in several TV documentaries, and his fingering of the failed O-rings during the investigation of the space shuttle Challengers fatal explosion. While maintaining a chronological presentation overall, Ottaviani adopts Feynmans own anecdotal and discursive manner in the best-selling Surely Youre Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985). Hence, simultaneous developments are presented discretely rather than in bits of this one, then that, then another taken in strict sequence. Myricks art is at once clean and casual; sharp lines depict rumpled figures and always look freehand, never ruled. As always in an Ottaviani book, an enthusiastically annotated (and illustrated) bibliography comes right before the very end, here a three-page comics coda.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)