Subtitled Adventures of a Curious Character, the title comes from the response his eyebrow-raising behavior once provoked from a Princeton dean's wife. Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, was surely the only person in history to solve the mystery of liquid helium, to be commissioned to paint a naked female toreador, and to crack the uncrackable safes guarding the atomic bomb's most critical secrets. He traded ideas with Einstein and Bohr, discussed gambling odds with Nick the Greek, and accompanied a ballet on the bongo drums. Here, woven with his scintillating views on modern science, is Feynman's astonishing life story-a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, eternal skepticism, and raging chutzpah.
"A chain reaction is not a bad analogy for Feynman's life. From a critical mass of gray matter it goes off in all directions, producing both heat and light."
