This brilliantly illustrated tale of reason,
insanity, love and truth recounts the story of Bertrand
Russell's life. Raised by his paternal grandparents,
young Russell was never told the whereabouts of his
parents. Driven by a desire for knowledge of his own
history, he attempted to force the world to yield to his
yearnings: for truth, clarity and resolve. As he grew
older, and increasingly sophisticated as a philosopher
and mathematician, Russell strove to create an objective
language with which to describe the world - one free of
the biases and slippages of the written word. At the
same time, he began courting his first wife, teasing her
with riddles and leaning on her during the darker days,
when his quest was bogged down by paradoxes,
frustrations and the ghosts of his family's secrets.
Ultimately, he found considerable success - but his
career was stalled when he was outmatched by an
intellectual rival: his young, strident, brilliantly
original student, Ludwig Wittgenstein. An insightful and
complexly layered narrative, Logicomix reveals both
Russell's inner struggle and the quest for the
foundations of logic.Narration by an older, wiser
Russell, as well as asides from the author himself, make
sense of the story's heady and powerful ideas. At its
heart, Logicomix is a story about the conflict between
pure reason and the persistent flaws of reality, a
narrative populated by great and august thinkers, young
lovers, ghosts and insanity. |
|