I am not proud to write that I am a science class dropout. I loved science in elementary school - everyone involved in classroom discussions, lots of hands-on work, all very exciting. In the 7th grade (first year of junior high) we walked into "Earth Science" in a class with concrete walls, dim lights, black wooden tables and a teacher who was longing for retirement. Somehow we managed to be bored out of our minds in a course that was about volcanoes and earthquakes. It was awful and only went downhill from there.

I took Earth Science II in 8th grade (copy the info down from the overhead and study for the test), Biology in 9th (dissect a frog and worm - we don't know why we are doing this but just do it), Chemistry in 10th (memorize the Periodic Table of the Elements - we won't tell you what they are, why they matter or what atomic weight means but the table will be on the test) and Physics in 11th. My Physics teacher was actually wonderful and I wanted to enjoy his class but I was so behind in the math at that point and really had no idea what physics was (by then I had too many years ingrained in my head of just strict memorization for the test when it came to science to actually learn) and so while I finished the year with a low C average (passing!) I did not take science my senior year. By college the only science I had was aviation related and when I went back to school years later for my history degree I took geology ("rocks for jocks") and did quite badly but still passed - which was basically all science had come to mean to me.

I convinced myself this was a subject area I wasn't going to learn much from and just needed to pass.

It was in grad school that I had a fellow student who was actually a history of science major - she had created her own grad degree and was taking northern studies courses as part of a program to learn about Arctic research in the 19th century. I was...well, I got positively swoony when she described what she was doing and her plans to be a museum curator someday. It was fascinating stuff and honestly it had never occurred to me that you could study science in a historical way. Science was always about doing something right in front of you - how things move or grow or blow up - but the history of those experiments and the men and women who conducted them in the past? No way.

You don't have to tell me how stupid this all was but please understand I did not learn about Marie Curie beyond a paragraph in a chemistry textbook. The Manhattan Project was something I learned in WWII history class in college. We just did not study actual scientists beyond men from LONG ago like Newton. (Not that there's anything wrong with Newton but he is a bit removed.) (And don't even get me started on how we never learned anything about women scientists.)

All of this is to say that while I had heard the name Richard Feynman and even tried to read some of his books in the past few years, I don't know much about him at all and thus was the perfect candidate for Jim Ottaviani's graphic novel Feynman. I'm a big fan of Ottaviani's and love that he writes about science and scientists. He's a really cool guy (I interviewed him once) with a diverse set of interests and fortunately for the rest of us, he writes extremely well about the people that interest him.

Feynman is a long gn (260+ pages) with realistic illustrations by Leland Myrick. It follows the physicist's life in chronological order using primarily his own words from interviews and his books. As his career spanned the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation there is a ton of stuff to talk about (and a lot had to be left out) but what's especially well done is that Feynman's personality comes through. He was a funny guy - his pranks breaking into safes at high powered labs are awesome - and he had no qualms about saying what he was thinking. But you also read about his struggles - the death of his first wife from a long illness is particularly heartbreaking - and the way he supported his younger sister as she sought a scientific career at a time when women were urged not to pursue those endeavors. Ottaviani also works in some of Feynman's lectures on more weightier topics, allowing readers to dip their feet in the science and start to get a grip on what he was involved in. Folks familiar with his work will likely find this unnecessary but they will enjoy the stories from his life and the joyful way he is portrayed on the page.

For me, I found the whole book to be a revelation. I have a lot of science fear because I know I don't know a lot and Feynman in particular has always been a challenge for me. (Honestly, The Big Bang Theory has gone a long way toward making science manageable for me.) (Don't laugh, it's a great show!) So this graphic novel works for people like me, for teens just getting their feet wet in the subject and also for long time fans of Feynman's work. I really enjoyed it a lot (my formal review will be in the Dec column) and can't recommend it enough. It made me feel...hopeful, if that makes any sense.

It's like I can still make up for all those bad classroom experiences - finally.

[Yep - got it from the publisher, First Second Books, who ROCK.] [Richard Feynman also played the bongos; I love this about him.]