Book Review: Hawking by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick

Hawking written by Jim Ottaviani, art by Leland Myrick, and coloring by Aaron Polk

Stephen Hawking's life and career were rather amazing. He grew up in England as a brilliant student with an indefatigable sense of humor. Weirdly, he wasn't a particularly hard-working student, often coasting by on his intelligence, which let him finish assignments at the last minute. When he was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, better known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's Disease. The prognosis was death in a few months or a few years at most. That prediction was in 1963; he lived to 2018. He overcame a lot of odds.

The disease was slow to ravage his body. He was independently mobile for a long time, though nowadays everyone pictures him in his customized wheelchair with a machine to help him speak. His mind was alway vibrant and he did a lot of work in theoretical physics and cosmology. Those fields were considered a fertile ground since a lot of progress still had to be made. Einstein and quantum physics were big leaps forward, but reconciling the two, and both of them with more classical conceptions of science, along with developing new concepts, still had to be done. Hawking worked with many other scientists and scholars to produce many advancements in our understanding of the universe.

Hawking also lived a full life. He had two children. He traveled quite a bit, visiting universities and laboratories around the world. After he became a celebrity, traveling became harder as he would be more noticed and more likely to be approached. He took it all as it came.

This book covers a bit of everything, with most of the focus on Hawking's science. I enjoyed it to a degree but felt like there wasn't enough depth. Perhaps Hawking's life and scientific contributions are too much for a graphic novel treatment. Or I just needed to think of this as a general overview.

Slightly recommended.