Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
The funniest, most life-affirming account of being a scientist ever written. Feynman's stories about safe-cracking at Los Alamos, learning to pick up women in bars, and doing Nobel Prize-winning physics communicate, better than any textbook, that science is about radical curiosity and the joy of not knowing.
The “frankly sexist story about picking up women” in bars, and the insult he threw after being turned down, is the most-flagged low point and now colours the rest, one reader saying “he sickened me a touch” and another landing on “mostly a world class knob.” Beyond it runs a broader pattern where nearly every anecdote ends with Feynman the smartest man in the room, which reads as bragging dressed as self-deprecation: “How very droll of you, Mr. Feynman.” His dismissiveness toward philosophy and the humanities is “quite odd coming from someone of his stature.” Stitched from taped conversations, “his memoir lacks content that could keep the reader riveted,” and “reading this book feels like babysitting a very rambunctious toddler.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
