Winner of the
Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir
Best Graphic Novels of the Year—
Forbes
Jewish Book Award Finalist
Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize
For
Persepolis
and
Logicomix
fans, a
New Yorker
cartoonist’s page-turning graphic biography of the fascinating Hannah Arendt,
the most prominent philosopher of the twentieth century
.
One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is best known for her landmark 1951 book on openness in political life,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
, which, with its powerful and timely lessons for today, has become newly relevant.
She led an extraordinary life. This was a woman who endured Nazi persecution firsthand, survived harrowing "escapes" from country to country in Europe, and befriended such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, in a world inhabited by everyone from Marc Chagall and Marlene Dietrich to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. A woman who finally had to give up her unique genius for philosophy, and her love of a very compromised man—the philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger—for what she called "love of the world."
Compassionate and enlightening, playful and page-turning,
cartoonist Ken Krimstein's
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
is a strikingly illustrated portrait of a complex, controversial, deeply flawed, and irrefutably courageous woman whose intelligence and "virulent truth telling" led her to breathtaking insights into the human condition, and whose experience continues to shine a light on how to live as an individual and a public citizen in troubled times.