Books on Extralogical

A fount of fascinating ideas, the book bubbles along on the crest of Chaitin’s enthusiasm. His excessive keenness on bold text and exclamation marks can be irksome, but the way the narrative uses the discussion of Ω to tie together transcendental numbers, the halting problem and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems is compelling.

Ever since five men were arrested in a burglary at Democratic headquarters, Watergate has thrown a gigantic shadow over American political life. Nixon’s resignation and the events that lead up to it arguably did more than anything else in the second half of the twentieth century to shape our perception of the presidency.

All The President’s Men is the story of those events, as told by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward: two men who, from the day the story first broke, were ever at the centre of the storm. Along with other investigative journalists like Seymour Hersh at the New York Times, in uncovering the truth about Watergate they did not merely report the news—they made the news.

Born in 1860 to a well-heeled Baltimore family, Benjamin Button appears at the time of his birth to be about seventy years old. As the years pass, he becomes younger, not older.

At eighteen, and looking fifty, he is is rejected by Yale as a “dangerous lunatic”. Denied entrance to university, he takes up the family business, and much to her father’s chagrin, marries the daughter of a general. In the fifteen years that follow, Roger Button & Co. Wholesale Hardware becomes ever more successful, but Benjamin’s marriage sours, as he grows ever younger and more vital.

As the years passed, her honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery.

Moreover, and most of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too anemic in her excitements and too sober in her taste.

Discontented, he joins the army and is decorated for bravery in the Spanish American War. Upon his return, he leads a lively social life—that, in fact, of a young man in his mid-twenties. Eventually, past fifty, and seeming twenty, he enters Harvard and stars in their demolition of Yale on the football field; a long-awaited revenge for their snub of thirty years earlier.

Such success, however, is fleeting. As his fifties pass he becomes a teenager, and then a child, eventually being committed to the care of a nurse. His end of days is not suffused with memory, but with the forgetfulness of childhood.

While Button’s underlying form is that of a comic fantasy, Fitzgerald uses his protagonist’s attempts to integrate with society to comment on its hypocrisy and intolerance. Benjamin Button attempts at every turn to do what society expects, but is accepted only when mistaken for someone or something else. He runs a successful business, fights bravely in a war, marries and raises a child, attends university and is victorious in sports—and yet at nearly every turn he is rejected, humiliated, attacked, ignored, despised.

Adapted from Fitzgerald’s original short story, this graphic novel is handsomely illustrated by Kevin Cornell. His sepia tones and expressive pencil lines seem made for this story; there are delights on every page, from period newspaper renderings to Benjamin’s remorseless glare as he scores seven touchdowns against Yale.

Given the chance to plot a visual development not just over the arc of a story, but over the seventy years of Benjamin’s life, Cornell has mustered a subtle and nuanced portrait that never tries to overwhelm the words, but perfectly complements them. His characters are alive with gloom, horror, complacency, anger, sorrow, smugness and delight. They tell their stories with their faces, all set on their predictable curves, while misfit Benjamin Button grows ever younger.