'Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, Richard Feynman was one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists, but he was also a man who fell, often jumped, into adventure. An artist, safe-cracker, practical joker and storyteller, Feynman's life was a series of combustible combinations made possible by his unique mixture of high intelligence, unquenchable curiosity and eternal skepticism. Over a period of years, Feynman's conversations with his friend Ralph Leighton were first taped and then set down as they appear here, little changed from their spoken form, giving a wise, funny, passionate and totally honest self-portrait of one of the greatest men of our age.'

This was a bookclub choice and was an interesting book to read. I didn't know anything about Feynman before, except that he was a physicist who'd been involved in the Manhattan Project. This book provides a very brief insight into his life, starting with some stories from his childhood and then much more about his working life. He is clearly an extremely intelligent guy and some of the parts where he talks about physics just went over my head but that didn't detract from the majority of it which was stories about other things he was doing in his life outside of his work. It did seem to skim a lot, there wasn't much depth to the stories as there wasn't really any emotion in there, it was mainly factual descriptions of things that happened, but it was a quick enjoyable read and provided a bit of interesting information about the role of scientists in the USA during the 20th century.

Thanks KT-J for registering, I've actually already started it :) .....

Finished this the other day, what can I say, although I enjoyed his stories to a degree and I was interested in his life but it was very badly written and reminded me of the stories kids write to tell their teachers what they did at the weekend.

Off to pjm65, I hope you enjoy it.

Arrived safe and sound. Thank you very much stubee for sending this to me.

Have heard about this man without really knowing a lot about him, so was interested to read this. Stubee' s description of the writing as like a kid's "What I did at the weekend" story amused me and is true to a certain extent. However, I got into the style quite quickly and the book is ultimately a written record of oral stories so it's going to read a bit like that.
I enjoyed a lot of the stories and Feynman is certainly a very passionate, hard-working and intelligent polymath. By the end of the book though he was starting to come across as quite full of himself and I wasn't massively impressed with his attitude to women.

Thanks stubee for sending this to me, I appreciate it. Now available for anyone who would like it.