Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe
Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe
Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe
Description
Description
From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, a brilliant graphic narrative revealing the pivotal year in Prague when Einstein became "Einstein," Kafka became "Kafka," and everything changed forever.
During the year that Prague was home to both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the trajectory of the two men's lives wove together in uncanny ways-as did their shared desire to tackle the world's biggest questions in Europe's strangest city. Tying the literary, scientific, and geographic centers of the world together for a single year, Einstein in Kafkaland tells an untold story of two of the modern era's defining figures, each brought to vivid life with stunning artwork in Krimstein's signature style, as they battle God for truth in a cosmic universe against the backdrop of Prague's intricacies and mysteries. For Einstein, his lost year spent in Prague became a critical bridge that connected months of failure and frustration, almost led him to "blow up" his greatest insights, and then led to the breakthrough thinking that set him on the path to what many have called "the greatest scientific discovery of all time." By researching his public statements, papers, lectures, and letters from this period, as well as the events of a planet electrifying itself into modernity, and aligning them with Kafka's very thorough diary, Krimstein animates their innovation through the city that harbored it. Einstein in Kafkaland shows how, by the time Einstein left Prague after many false starts and blind alleys, he had finally uncovered the way to his General Theory of Relativity, and how, after many similar false starts and blind alleys, Kafka produced his first masterpiece, The Judgment-both casting an irrevocable spell that would define modern reality, a world where art and science merge in inevitable, irreplaceable ways.
About the Author
About the Author
Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and has been published in eight countries and in six languages. He is also the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can and, most recently, When I Grow Up, named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and the Washington Post. A recipient of a Yaddo residency, he lives and writes and draws in Evanston, Illinois.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"Bending real history into a fantastical tale of two young thinkers in pursuit of 'the true truth, ' [a] playful graphic novel by New Yorker cartoonist Krimstein . . . Irreverent yet full of tenderness for its subjects, Krimstein's experiment is a dizzying delight." --Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Einstein in Kafkaland is crisply written, witty, and with art that evokes places in time and feelings in the way all great graphic stories should. Along with some of Einstein's important physics, you may learn just what Kafka was driving at. One man manages to convince his readers the universe is impossible to understand; it's mysterious, even hostile. The other discovers the universe is knowable, if we embrace a future determined by gravity. If that seems weird and Kafka-esque, read on." --Bill Nye "Clever, charming, amusing, and just plain brilliant. Ken Krimstein is the most inventive graphic biographer on the planet-and certainly the only one who could explain both Einstein and Kafka. A page turner on gravity and relativity!" --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus, the biography that inspired the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer "Art and science collide in Ken Krimstein's new graphic biography. In this book, the author of the brilliant and whimsical The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt similarly translates careful research into scenic, emotive comics-in this case tracking the potential effects of an adventitious meeting in Prague between two geniuses on the cusp of world-changing discoveries." --NPR, "Summer Books Our Critics Can't Wait to Read" "For the science-challenged, it comes as a relief and a delight to have gravity and relativity explained in Ken Krimstein's marvelously inventive graphic novel." --The New York Sun "[Krimstein] engagingly chronicles a significant time period for both [Einstein and Kafka] . . . A fun, amusing fantasy about an important year in two icons' lives." --Kirkus Reviews "Krimstein builds a remarkable historical fantasy that draws [Einstein and Kafka] together, each pulled along in their own way by the White Rabbit (yes, THAT White Rabbit) . . . readers seeking to go down the rabbit hole and feel the truth will be at home in these pages." --Booklist
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Publishing
Pub date:
2024-08-20
Length:
272 pages
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