Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Paperback – November 2, 1993

I picked this up because I'm a big fan of James Gleick, who I consider one of the best science writers around. His book on chaos theory, Chaos: Making a New Science, changed my life back in the 1980s. His special strength is that he glosses the mathematical tough stuff without losing the interesting heart of the topics at hand. I imagined that he was going to provide some deep insights into Richard Feynman's physics - and Gleick doesn't disappoint here - but this isn't the heart of this book. The heart of this book is Feynman the man - and that makes this much more a biography than a science book. It's tough to write a biography of Richard Feynman because Feynman did such a good job of bringing his personality to the public at large, in famous books of anecdotes such as Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character). Gleick doesn't skip this charming content, but he puts it in a larger context of the details of Richard Feynman's life: his loves, his career, his challenges and triumphs. It's all here. Feynman's prodigal math skills and his oracular brilliance in his field; his titanic rivalries; particularly the long, sometimes collaborative one with the equally impressive Murray Gell-Mann at Cal-Tech. Gleick gives us a balanced account, moving smoothly from Feynman's colorful childhood in Far Rockaway to MIT to Princeton and his collaboration with his advisor and mentor, the great Archibald Wheeler. We get inside his tragic love with his first wife, Arline - which helps us understand his subsequent almost predatory lady killer ways before he finally settles down. We get deep inside his work on the Manhattan Project where his math genius and special skills on pragmatic real world problems were shown in high relief, along with his disregard for authority, sense of humor, and even his pathos. At the end we find him terminally ill (his recurrent cancers perhaps a distant consequence of his work with radioactive materials) but still the one with the penetrating eye for the heart of the problem and an iconoclastic disregard for sacred cows who cut to the heart of the issue of the Challenger disaster.I was expecting a dissection of Quantum Electrodynamics from Gleick. We get a little bit of that - but ultimately we get a living, breathing human being, drumming away with relentless energy and precise measured timing. This is a tour de force work of biography. Months later, I am still haunted by it. Feynman had such a rare set of abilities, yet ultimately he was all flesh and blood and mortal. As the world reels from the huge challenges ahead I find myself aching for someone like Feynman to slice into the biggest problems with such ninja flair. I put this in my top ten books I've read in the last decade.

It’s tough trying to relate a life that a person lived combined with his contributions to physics. The author has done a good job, but some of the science requires a lot of concentration.I certainly learned a lot about this brilliant, down to earth man. I thank the author.

To my mind, this book certainly establishes James Gleick as a master of scientific biography. He weaves in all the elements we could hope for: biographic details on Feynman which give a coherent sense of the man and his life, insights into other famous people he interacted with (Gell-Mann, Oppenheimer, etc.), and plenty of substantive information on the ideas and development of 20th-century physics. And Gleick presents all of this through a buttery-smooth narrative which enabled me to glide along almost effortlessly, making this long book go by fairly quickly. I certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in Feynman or 20th-century physics, or who just enjoys reading a well-written biography of an interesting person.Now let me offer a few personal thoughts on my impression of Feynman. From a technical standpoint, he had a formidably deep feel for mathematics going far beyond just manipulating symbols, and he had a similarly strong intuitive grasp of physical behavior, apparently related to a burning curiosity to understand how the physical world works. He combined this theoretical and intuitive power with a relentless creative drive, which resulted in development of quite original and useful mathematical and mechanistic models (eg, Feynman diagrams). Moreover, his creativity was linked to an individualistic and sometimes iconoclastic need to do things his own way, so he tended to avoid studying the work of others, didn't really collaborate much with colleages, and even periodically reorganized established knowledge in his own way (hence the Feynman lectures on physics).But Feynman's curiosity was a bounded curiosity, as he seemed to have little interest in much beyond physics. This made him something of an uncultured philistine, with a resulting overall immaturity and (dare I say it) shallowness. We see this in Feynman's somewhat self-indulgent personality, as evidenced by a kind of defiant roughness and rudeness, episodes of selfishness, and considerable womanizing, sometimes with wives of colleagues (perhaps he was just never able to recover from the tragic loss of his first wife?).In the end, I think Feynman was shaped as much by his limitations as his strengths. His unique combination of curiosity, technical ability, individualism, creativity, and passion gave him unique potential, and his limitations focused that potential in a productive direction. He seems to have been reasonably happy overall in his life, and he certainly helped make the world a more interesting place, so perhaps it was all for the best.