⭐ “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Feynman

Full Title	“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character
Authors	Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings
Year Published	2018
Date Read	March 30, 2019
Rating	1/5 stars

Was only able to listen to this for an hour. You have to be pretty egotistical to put out a book with a title (and subtitle) like this, and the content shows. Feynman walks a very fine line between “here’s a funny/interesting story” and “here’s a story that makes me look good,” and I found that often he strays too far into the latter category. One specific example is how he tends to use verbs like “discovered” or “invented” when talking about his ‘exploits’: for things that are neither new discoveries nor new inventions. This comes off as intellectually dishonest to me, and results in a very irritating reading experience. Other stories don’t suffer from this annoyance but end up simply being uninteresting, which isn’t much better.

Overall, I felt the book was published mainly to further the myth of Feynman. It might be a fun read for those with a physics background, but I wouldn’t consider recommending it to anyone else.

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