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Imserba Webstore - Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
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List Price: $22.95
Our Price: $13.97
Your Save: $ 8.98 ( 39% )
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Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 192
EAN: 9781596914520
ISBN: 1596914521
Label: Bloomsbury USA
Manufacturer: Bloomsbury USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2009-09-29
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Release Date: 2009-09-29
Studio: Bloomsbury USA
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Editorial Reviews:
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An innovative, dramatic graphic novel about the treacherous pursuit of the foundations of mathematics. This exceptional graphic novel recounts the spiritual odyssey of philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But his most ambitious goal—to establish unshakable logical foundations of mathematics—continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity. This story is at the same time a historical novel and an accessible explication of some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork, the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a highly satisfying tale. Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality. Apostolos Doxiadis studied mathematics at Columbia University. His international bestseller Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture spearheaded the impressive entrance of mathematics into the world of storytelling. Apart from his work in fiction, Apostolos has also worked in film and theater and is an internationally recognized expert on the relationship of mathematics to narrative. Christos H. Papadimitriou is C . Lester Hogan professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was won numerous international awards for his pioneering work in computational complexity and algorithmic game theory. Christos is the author of the novel Turing: A Novel about Computation. Alecos Papadatos worked for over twenty years in film animation in France and Greece. In 1997, he became a cartoonist for the major Athens daily To Vima. He lives in Athens with his wife, Annie Di Donna, and their two children. Annie Di Donna studied graphic arts and painting in France and has worked as animator on many productions, among them Babar and Tintin. Since 1991, she has been running an animation studio with her husband, Alecos Papadatos. This innovative graphic novel is based on the early life of the brilliant philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell and his impassioned pursuit of truth. Haunted by family secrets and unable to quell his youthful curiosity, Russell became obsessed with a Promethean goal: to establish the logical foundation of all mathematics. In his agonized search for absolute truth, Russell crosses paths with legendary thinkers like Gottlob Frege, David Hilbert, and Kurt Gödel, and finds a passionate student in the great Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the object of his defining quest continues to loom before him. Through love and hate, peace and war, Russell persists in the dogged mission that threatens to claim both his career and his personal happiness, finally driving him to the brink of insanity. Logicomix is at the same time a historical novel and an accessible explication to some of the biggest ideas of mathematics and modern philosophy. With rich characterizations and expressive, atmospheric artwork, the book spins the pursuit of these ideas into a captivating tale. Probing and ingeniously layered, the book throws light on Russell’s inner struggles while setting them in the context of the timeless questions he spent his life trying to answer. At its heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between an ideal rationality and the unchanging, flawed fabric of reality. "At the heart of Logicomix stands Sir Bertrand Russell, a man determined to find a way of arriving at absolutely right answers. It's a tale within a tale, as the two authors and two graphic artists ardently pursue their own search for truth and appear as characters in the book. As one of them assures us, this won't be 'your typical, usual comic book.' Their quest takes shape and revolves around a lecture given by Russell at an unnamed American university in 1939, a lecture that is really, as he himself tells us, the story of his life and of his pursuit of real logical truth. With Proustian ambition and exhilarating artwork, Logicomix's search for truth encounters head-on the horrors of the Second World War and the agonizing question of whether war can ever be the right choice. Russell himself had to confront that question personally: he endured six months in jail for his pacifism. Russell was determined to find the perfect logical method for solving all problems and attempted to remold human nature in his experimental school at Beacon Hill. Despite repeated failures, Russell never stopped being 'a sad little boy desperately seeking ways out of the deadly vortex of uncertainty.' The book is a visual banquet chronicling Russell's lifelong pursuit of 'certainty in total rationality.' As Logic and Mathematics, the last bastions of certainty, fail him, and as Reason proves not absolute, Russell is forced to face the fact that there is no Royal Road to Truth. Authors Dosiadis and Papadimitriou perfectly echo Russell's passion, with a sincere, easily grasped text amplified with breathtaking visual richness, making this the most satisfying graphic novel of 2009, a titanic artistic achievement of more than 300 pages, all of it pure reading joy."—Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness "This is an extraordinary graphic novel, wildly ambitious in daring to put into words and drawings the life and thought of one of the great philosophers of the last century, Bertrand Russell. The book is a rare intellectual and artistic achievement, which will, I am sure, lead its readers to explore realms of knowledge they thought were forbidden to them."—Howard Zinn "This magnificent book is about ideas, passions, madness, and the fierce struggle between well-defined principle and the larger good. It follows the great mathematicians—Russell, Whitehead, Frege Cantor, Hilbert—as they agonized to make the foundations of mathematics exact, consistent, and complete. And we see the band of artists and researchers—and the all-seeking dog Manga—creating, and participating in, this glorious narrative."—Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University, and author of Imagining Numbers (Particularly the Square Root of Minus Fifteen) "The lives of ideas (and those who think them) can be as dramatic and unpredicteable as any superhero fantasy. Logicomix is witty, engaging, stylish, visually stunning, and full of surprising sound effects, a masterpiece in a genre for which there is as yet no name."—Michael Harris, professor of mathematics at Université Paris 7 and member of the Institut Universitaire de France
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good story but gets bogged down as it proceeds
Comment: I wanted to like this more than I ended up liking it. Unfortunately, some of the story telling came off as too gimmicky and the romantic elements were below average in execution. That said, this is an entertaining retelling of the history of logic and mathematics and exposition of the people involved. Despite its flaws its worth reading especially, for those interested in the history and characters, in particular Betrand Russell behind it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting and ambitous, this graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and his ideas sometimes fell flat
Comment: An interesting graphic novel about Bertrand Russell, dealing both with his personal life as well as the development of his ideas, as his research in mathematics and logic tries to discover the foundations of mathematics. Other mathematicians and logicians of the time such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Alfred North Whitehead, David Hilbert and Kurt Godel have a prominent role in the book. A quick read, with appealing drawings, this was written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Chistos Papadimitriou (both Greek, the first a novelist with a background in math, the second a computer scientist that teaches in UC Berkeley) and drawn by Alecos Papadatos and Annie di Donna (he from Greece, she from France). Logicomix starts chronologically from Russell's birth in 1872 in a prominent family (his grandfather was a former British prime minister) and ends in to 1939 as he is in a speaking engagement in an American university and is confronted by pacifists about his position as World War II starts. While the book takes some minor liberties with the facts, it is quite faithful in presenting the complex ideas behind logic and mathematics to a lay reader Unfortunately, as an apparent comic relief, the comic book is framed self-referentially in the present, as the two authors and the two artists try to develop the book and wonder somewhat condescendingly if the subject matter would be too complex for readers. The dialogue in the present is full of awful banter that seems to be taken out of some very bad sitcom (for instance, there are constant jokes about the French-born drawer pronouncing ze instead of the). Because of this very poor framework, I rate the book four stars instead of five.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice effort
Comment: I was expecting to understand the philosphy of Russel Bertrand through this book , major portion of this book is devoted to the life of Russel , his personal struggles etc rather than his work and philosophy and places where his phlosophy is explained it looked vague, probably i lack the maturity to understand it, some day i would give it one more try , though the Art and graphics are above average overall a nice and bold effort.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nice Try
Comment: I gave this 4 stars for the attempt--though more like 2 or 3 stars for the execution. It is amazing to me that someone tried to do a graphic novel on this subject, and I want to celebrate that. And some of the issues were handled pretty well. But some were just odd. It never became clear why Russell's speech in 1939 made a useful pivot for the story line. While it seemed to be trying to integrate his logic and his politics, it never worked. While I appreciate the interest in life and work together, it didn't seem to amount to much here. The craziness of logicians seemed to be much exaggerated--Turing was quite sane (until persecuted for his homosexuality), as was Church, and many others. The oddest part of the "plot" was the use of the Oresteia. While I am quite familiar with Greek tragedy and with modern Logic, I saw no useful connection between them here.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a fascinating work
Comment: A novel and entertaining story of the development of logic, presented in comic book format and told in terms of the personal lives of its main characters. I would enjoy seeing other philosophical themes treated in this manner. KN
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