Surely you're joking,Mr.Feynman -- Book Review

I love reading biographies/autobiographies and have read countless of them but have to admit this is the most hilarious and unusual autobiography that I have ever read.

What would you expect the autobiography of a nobel prize winning physicsist (Richard Feynman) to be ? Dull,filled with equations,lecturing . Feynman's autobiography is anything but that . He is Mark Twain & Albert Einstein & Robin Williams (yeah the funny actor) all rolled into one.This book is not a typical autobiography but a collection of his eccentric escapedes & adventures.

The Man : His achievements are breath taking. An MIT,Princeton Grad who was part of "Project Manhattan" ( Atom Bomb development during WW2), Professor at Caltech , Nobel Prize Winner (Physics) in 1965 and one of the leading lights of quantum electrodynamics.Behind this serious face is an eccentric ,free-wheeling spirit.

The book is replete with humor & fun. His fascination with languages ( He learnt Spanish,Portuguese,Japanese) , his career as an amateur musician ( bongo drums) , dabbling with arts ( He learnt painting after an argument with a friend over Arts Vs Science) and selling a few of his paintings , Learning how to pick a girl in a bar from an illiterate friend , doing the math behind the gambling in Las vegas , feeling terribly uncomfortable about the parties after winnng the Nobel Prize .Also amusing are his meetings with other celebrities such as Pauli,Enrico Fermi,Niels Bohr, Von Neumann.

Some excerpts from the book :

" When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else.But at MIT there was a rule:You have to take some humanities courses to get more "culture".I found astronomy & philosophy as humanities courses and signed up for them right away ! It was the closest thing to science I could find"

" You will be interested and amused to know that you are now talking to the chief research scientist of the Metaplast Corp,whose staff consisted of one bottle-washer!"

" I went to register for the spanish class, when this pneumatic blonde came along.She looked terrific.I said to myself "May be she is going to be in Spanish Class -- that'll be great !" But she walked into portuguese class.So I figured, what the hell- I might as well learn Portuguese" .

Behind all this humor,fun & eccentricity lies a razor sharp mind,insatiable curiosity and intellectual honesty. Feynman lived life to the fullest and could have never done it better !

P.S : Here is more on Richard Feynman from Wikipedia.