This is how ALL autobiographies should be written
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Don't pretend you wrote it yourself. Ghostwritten "auto"biographies are rubbish - how much is actually from the subject? Try it this way. Have conversations with your "ghostwriter" who can put on paper what you have said.
Result - A sparkling, humerous and easily read piece which actually serves to put across some of the character of the subject. Lots of great stories here, and yet again RF could be accused of being too full of his own importance, but surely that's what makes someone a genius. A shrinking violet wouldn't have had half as interesting a life as RF, or "Ofey" as we may call him perhaps.
This (and "surely you're joking") are possible the best autobiographies, or indeed biographies I have read.
BRILLIANT!
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Must-read one
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This is one of my favourite books.
Interesting life of one intelligent person with atypical sense of humour with interesting style of thinking.
Long part about physics may be boring for some kinds of people, but it still also contain a lot of interesting to read. Either way if you are absolutely out of physics you will maybe close this book on first sites of the second part.
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Feynman protects some NASA careers
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This book is pretty funny. Although NASA knew exactly what had caused the Challenger disaster, they found it convenient to lay a trail for Feynman, enabling him to rediscover what they had known all along. To what purpose? you might ask. Simple: so they could then say, "My God! So it was the O-rings then! Thank-you for enlightening us, O Great One!" and thereby protect a few careers. What gets me, though, and what comes through clearly in the book, is that at no point does Feynman ever consider the possibility that anyone less brilliant than himself could have reached the same conclusions. This no doubt made him the perfect stooge.
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Wish I had read this before I met him...
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I was a Caltech undergrad, and I met Feynman before I started at Caltech. He gave a lecture to us summer science students (who were all studying Physics) in the Summer of 1987. I just wish I had read, Surely Your Joking..., and What Do You Care... back then. When I read Surely Your Joking, I realized why he didn't want us asking questions about his life, Nobel Prize, etc. He wanted us to ask questions about physics problems. If I had read these books beforehand, my curiosity about his life would have been satiated and I would have known the kind of question to ask. Well, he died between that summer and the following fall when I started as a Caltech Freshman. Would have been nice to study physics with him. As it was, our physics class was good anyway... David Goodstein and Jerry Pine were the instructors.
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Another wonderful book
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The sequel to Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character - this is a book of two parts. The first part is essentially a continuation of the previous volume - more very entertaining anecdotes. The second, and in many ways more interesting part, is about Feynman's role in the investigation of the Space Shuttle disaster. This is a fascinating story - his meetings with NASA engineers and managers tell an interesting story about how management sends you mad and/or makes you stupid. For example, every manager he asked, even though they were all trained as engineers, said there was a zero chance of the shuttle failing catastrophically. Not a position Feynman had a lot of patience with. Highly recommended
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