Feynman [Hardcover]

"Feynman" is a completely captivating look at the strange and wonderful late physicist Richard Feynman. I have been reading lots of Jim Ottaviani lately, and this is by far the best. His collaboration with graphic artist Leland Myrick has produced a level of storytelling that is clear, entertaining and informative. "Feynman" operates at the level of what all graphic novels should aspire to be.

The book takes us through Feynman's early years. It was poignant to see him struggle to feed scientific books to his little sister Joan, in a day when little girls weren't supposed to want to be scientists. We see a puckish Feynman at Los Alamos during the war, and his loving efforts to tend to his ailing wife. After the war, we see him developing his theories of Quantum Electrodynamics and win a Nobel. His efforts to clarify the causes of the Challenger disaster - famously dipping O-ring material into a glass of cold water -- get the coverage they deserve. Only in the last pages does the narrative falter. Feynman's final trial with illness and death are barely shown.

The famous Feynman personality comes across very well in these pages. He is the smirking warrior, sneaking in and out of the Los Alamos compound through a hole in the fence that the military insisted did not exist. His brilliance is more than hinted at. He develops a notation to help him with his quantum calculations. The book is even not afraid to show him as somewhat of a kook and horn dog, ogling pretty coeds, hanging out in hot tubs at Esalen and doing his research in a strip club. The man was unstoppable and inscrutable.

Some of the sciencey sections of the book may be too much. It's hard to tell whether Ottaviani and Myrick got carried away by certain esoteric aspects of quantum theory, or whether they were trying to show that Feynman's genius reached staggering heights. But these sections are brief. Enough to known that Feynman would go toe to toe with the great minds of his time - Bohr, Einstein and Fermi.

"Feynman" is a loving look at the life story of a man whose brilliance shone clarifying light into some murky corners. A wonderful read - the rare graphic novel I'd rate as a 6 if I could!

With his colorful personality and constant propensity to get into all kinds of adventures, Richard Feynman is probably the perfect scientific character to commit to comic book form, so in one way this graphic novel is long due. What is remarkable is how powerfully Ottaviani and Myrick harness this unique medium to accurately dramatize the life and qualities of this genius. Both authors are uniquely qualified for this endeavor, having already penned graphic portraits of Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer and Leo Szilard.

Ottaviani and Myrick manage to capture the essential characteristics that made Feynman such a cherished teacher, scientist, friend, colleague, and public personality. Most importantly, the book succeeds in vividly bringing out Feynman's quintessential quality of almost obsessively staking out his own iconoclastic path both in science and in life. The biography is really a memoir akin to "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" since it features Feynman's own account of his life, work and intellectual development. The great strength of the book is that it uses close-ups and color to highlight key words and moments from Feynman's life. While the biographical information in the book has been covered in other works and most notably in Feynman's own memoirs, the comic book form has a very different impact because of the combined literary-visual effect it has on the viewer.

For instance, in describing Feynman's time at Los Alamos, one can actually see people's bewildered faces as they struggled to comprehend both his genius in solving intractable physics problems and his wildly successful attempts at safe-breaking. There are evocative close-ups of Feynman's father teaching him to appreciate and truly understand nature during walks in the park, of Feynman encouraging his sister to learn science and his wonderful and tragic relationship with his first wife. Also included are Feynman's strip-club forays (during which he solved physics problems), his famous dunking of the Challenger space shuttle's O-rings into a glass of cold water to demonstrate their failure (again rendered much more dramatic by the graphic medium) and some fairly detailed albeit brief discussions of his pioneering work in quantum mechanics.

I was especially convinced of the power of the graphic form during the parts dealing with Feynman's lectures about scientific wonder and humility. As he paced the podium at Caltech and stressed the importance of holding oneself to an absolute standard of integrity, successive panels of the book zoomed in on his face. This device which is commonly employed in comic books imparts a heightened sense of importance to the words in a way that would not be evident on simply reading them. The other idea used in the comic medium is to intersperse the narrative with divergent panels; for instance, Feynman's eloquent description of science as a great game of chess intersects with snapshots of a chess game played by two people in a park where his father has taken him for a walk.

The minor gripe I have with this comic account is that the faces of different characters are sometimes not easily distinguishable. In addition the narrative would have had a bigger impact if the characters resembled their real life counterparts. But these minor points detract little from the volume's novelty. Ottaviani and Myrick have done a wonderful job in making a unique scientist and human being come alive in these pages. With the mountains of literature written about Feynman one would think that there's nothing new that could be said or done. But this "dramatic picture" of Richard Feynman, as his friend Freeman Dyson calls it, will occupy a proud place on the shelves of Feynman fans. Knowing his fondness for fun, Dick would undoubtedly have approved.

I am very much a fan of Feynman. I met him a couple of times, heard him lecture a few times, and "grew up" on the "Lectures", of which I have copies of the first editions. He was a brilliant physicist as well as a brilliant raconteur; some argue, with cause, that the latter leads non-physicists to overrate his significance in twentieth century physics. But he was one of the leading physicists of his century, and his skills as a teacher made him beloved by the generations of physicists who have followed him.

This well done and mostly easy-reading graphic "biography" tells the Feynman story with Feynman as narrator. It is, of course, a posthumous narration and, as such, represents a bit of hagiography on the part of the author (Ottaviani). But the voice of Feynman comes through, and with it, for me, comes a pleasing sense of nostalgia.

What keeps me from five stars is that this is presented as a biography, while it is actually a compilation of Feynman's reminiscences in graphic form. So it is really a posthumous memoir, and if were billed as that I would give it five stars. But it is called a biography, and as such it fails because it lacks any independent or critical viewpoint.

But don't let that keep you from reading it. The Feynman story as told by Feynman is a terrific story, even if his contemporaries might have quibbled with pieces here and there. Love it on its own terms.

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