Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?

[lightreads]

Nonfiction. Recollections from the physicist, teacher, and Nobel Prize winner, somewhere in the hinterland between sketch biography and memoir. Chatty,comfortably first person, amusing. I suspect it's an unfortunate consequence of the books' geneses -- transcriptions of some of Feynman's oral retellings -- but he comes across as rather self-centered, out to show everybody how he thinks differently and his way is better. Also, I think if I had ever met him
in real life, I would have adored him at first breath and then strangled him within five minutes. A good time, though, particularly the first one, with some pricelessly funny anecdotes about the stranger side of life at Los Alamos in the years before the bomb.