Jim Ottaviani writes and Leland Myrick illustrates the story of Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, deep thinker and colorful character. Pieced together from the many books Feynman himself dictated and published, as well as several family primary sources, Feynman is a tour de force in the nonfiction graphic novel genre, written in the first person from Richard Feynman's own perspective.
The distinctive presentation of both Feynman's life and perspective through Ottaviani's well-written dialogue and Myrick's finely drawn illustrations gives readers a particularly personal insight into one of the smartest men in the field of science. The graphic novel begins with Feynman's recollection of being a child, encouraged to think and engineer and play with science by his father. The book moves on through Feynman's life during World War II, working on the Manhattan Project, his "discovery" of quantum electrodynamics theories, his lectures and tours of the world, his love of women and other thinkers of his generation, to his long-planned but never consummated trip to Tannu Tuva.
Not one to suffer fools gladly, Richard Feynman found ways to "play" with math and theories of physics and science, inventing new ways of seeing the universe as well as new ways of representing the theories pictorially. This is the best kind of story for presentation in graphic novel form as the words and pictures work in concert to produce as a whole something more than either can do separately. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor