Book Review: Logicomix

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 Talker: A graphic novel of titanic artistic achievement about Bertrand Russell's doomed search for total rationality.