The Top 10 Everything of 2009

It makes a kind of looking-glass sense to approach a subject as ostensibly lofty and abstruse as the life of Bertrand Russell, one of the great logicians of the 20th century, through the medium of the comic book. Apostolos Doxiadis' charming dialogue and Alecos Papadatos' simple, affecting drawings give the story an immediacy and approachability that nothing else could. And what a story: Russell was obsessed with grounding logic in immutable mathematical principles, but the quest consumed his life and led him to the very doorstep of logic's dark twin, madness.

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