Anyone can be the subject of a graphic biography, and New Yorker cartoonist Krimstein has chosen leading philosopher Hannah Arendt, whose celebrated The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951 and has reemerged as a best seller following the rise of scabrous populism everywhere. Krimstein's biography shows us Arendt's repeated escape from Nazi persecution throughout Europe and finally to America, friendship with the likes of Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, and complicated love for philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. The book that will make me a graphic-format reader.

New Yorker cartoonist Krimstein's biography of leading German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) opens with Arendt as a child, demonstrating insatiable curiosity and preternatural smarts ("By the time I'm 14, I've read all of Kant's books. But I still don't have all the answers"), even as she discovers what it means to be a Jew in increasingly hostile 1920s–30s Germany. As a young woman, she wows the era's great artists and thinkers, smartly identified in side panels, and develops her own philosophy ("Throwness," she says drily to a puzzled Albert Einstein). As Krimstein deftly weaves Arendt's life and thought, he captures the excitement of the philosophical enterprise in both word ("THINKING HAS BECOME EROTIC. ELECTRIC, ECSTATIC") and image: fine, wiry black lines with the occasional brush of green effectively echo Arendt's energized thinking and the tensions of a life lived in constant escape, one step ahead of the Nazis. Through it all, Arendt remains witty, even saucy. And Krimstein doesn't shy away from Arendt's complicated love for philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. VERDICT Both smart and entertaining; highly recommended and not just for graphic novels readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18; previewed in Jody Osicki's "Graphically Speaking," LJ 6/15/18.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Krimstein's fascinating if cluttered biographical portrait divides political theorist Hannah Arendt's extraordinary life into a loose triptych. In Germany, she is a curly-haired scribble of a girl (a smudge of green in a black-and-white landscape) and a precocious scholar among a who's-who of 20th-century thinkers. Martin Heidegger is her lover and foil. As the Nazis rise, she flees to France and, later, New York. The footnote-heavy primer suffers by being more intent on recording names, faces, and historical details than on quality storytelling. Krimstein's use of the first person, adopting Arendt's voice, is sporadic and jarring. Yet his love for his subject is undeniable, as he argues that Arendt's struggles as a Jew and a woman enabled her to transcend the work of traditional truth seekers. His tribute is at its most tender when Arendt speaks to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, who appears to her as a water stain on her ceiling. When Arendt says about captured SS officer Adolf Eichmann, "If we turn into a demonic monster, we somehow absolve him of his crime, and all of us our potential crime," she roils under backlash that evokes today's woker-than-thou Twitter pile-ons. This is a complicated, moving, uneven story that resonates in just such times. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency (Sept.)