MixedThe Women’s Review of Books[Krimstein\'s] accessible book on Hannah Arendt is an inspired and provocative creation, but is also plagued by serious deficiencies ... In Krimstein’s creation, we see both the opportunities and limitations of the graphic-bio genre ... Krimstein devotes a full ten pages to Arendt’s sexual liaison with Heidegger when she was his student. Important though it may be, was this lengthy description really so essential? His explicit depictions of Arendt’s nudity (hardly any of Heidegger, of course) seem gratuitous and unnecessary—too graphic even for a graphic biography ... I wish he had abbreviated l’affaire Heidegger and devoted much more space to the Eichmann controversy ... The challenge to a graphic novel about a great intellectual is this: how does one picture the inner life of a person, especially in the act of thinking? ... In addition to this inherent obstacle, the book has serious omissions. For example, there is virtually no mention of the Nazi rise to power in the late 1920s and Hitler’s seizure of the government in 1933 ... One of the most egregious gaps occurs toward the end of the book, when Krimstein fails to bring into the picture the six important books and many essays that Arendt wrote after Eichmann in Jerusalem ... Furthermore, Krimstein gives very scant reference to one of Arendt’s most important and supportive friends— the writer Mary McCarthy.
