Hawking
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Following their New York Times-bestselling graphic novel Feynman, Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick deliver a gripping biography of Stephen Hawking, one of the most important scientists of our time.
From his early days at the St Albans School and Oxford, Stephen Hawking’s brilliance and good humor were obvious to everyone he met. A lively and popular young man, it’s no surprise that he would later rise to celebrity status.
At twenty-one he was diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Though the disease weakened his muscles and limited his ability to move and speak, it did nothing to limit his mind. He went on to do groundbreaking work in cosmology and theoretical physics for decades after being told he had only a few years to live. He brought his intimate understanding of the universe to the public in his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Soon after, he added pop-culture icon to his accomplishments by playing himself on shows like Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and becoming an outspoken advocate for disability rights.
In Hawking, writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick have crafted an intricate portrait of the great thinker, the public figure, and the man behind both identities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This layered graphic biography of the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking presents a heroic yet nuanced portrait of the 20th century's second-most famous scientist, after Albert Einstein. A gawky motormouthed teen "hopeless at building things, and speaking Hawkingese," Hawking was a brilliant yet haphazard student at Oxford, with no respect for the "grey men" who spent their time studying. The physics that filled his buzzing mind are explored by Ottaviani (Feynman) as less a field of study than as Hawking's own joyful pursuit, and Myrick's dramatically angled but simplistic artwork often renders his subject with a wry grin. The motor neuron disease that eventually progressed to Hawking requiring a motorized wheelchair plays in the background while the authors unfurl complex spreads laying out how Hawking debated with his contemporaries and used his equations to explore the far corners of existence ("At this level, math is as much art as it is anything else"). Hawking's divorces and emotional distance from his family are poignantly represented, but the story remains about science, which is delivered in an accessible form yet hardly watered down. This smart and wondrously exploratory scientific biography reveals as much about black holes as the man who explored them. This review has been updated for clarity.
