Showing posts with label Surely You're Joking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Surely You're Joking. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Richard Feynman Comes Alive in Unorthodox Autobiography

I finished reading Richard Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" last week, and still find myself laughing about it today.  What could have been a conventional autobiography of the Nobel Prize winner for physics is instead a collection of quirky stories, through which one really gets to know the man.  To give you a sense of the tone of the book, Feynman mentions the Nobel Prize he won about halfway through it, as a sort of after-thought - the focus is rather on what he is truly proud of, like, for example, his ability to break into safes that contained top-secret information about the Manhattan project during the second World War.