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From: leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.sci
Subject: SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN
Message-ID: <1811@mtgzz.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Apr-86 17:56:45 EST
Article-I.D.: mtgzz.1811
Posted: Thu Apr 17 17:56:45 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Apr-86 10:31:14 EST
Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ
Lines: 46
Xref: watmath net.books:3403 net.sci:733


	   SURELY YOU'RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN by Richard P. Feynman
			     Bantam, 1986, $4.50.
		       A book review by Mark R. Leeper

     First let me say what this book is not.  It is neither a biography nor
an autobiography of Richard Feynman.  It is more like a biography in which
all the facts that would go into his eventual obituary have been removed.
reading this book you get very little idea of why Feynman is considered an
important physicist.  You get very little of his work.  You even miss most
of his personal life.  The events are in chronological order and suddenly
part way into the book you discover he is married.  This comes as a surprise
because up to that point there is little to indicate that the ungainly
student would ever find someone to marry.  Then shortly after that his wife
is dying.  In one scene he cries for her, then she is never mentioned again.
At other points in the book he mentions two other wives without ever
mentioning how he carry to marry them.

     What this book is, then, is a collection of unrelated anecdotes,
arranged very roughly in the order that they occurred.  Most of them carry a
subtext of what a great and versatile mind Feynman has.  If in fact this is
the way Feynman really talks (the stories have been collected by Ralph
Leighton, who shows up several times toward the end of the book), he is
considerably more vain than I would have expected.

     Nevertheless, if even a fraction of the stories are true Feynman has a
considerable amount to be vain about.  Memorable are the stories of how he
became the safecracker of the Manhattan Project, his arguments with Talmudic
scholars (memorable because he admits to having been bested by someone
else), his art lessons, and his experiences rating textbooks.  Many of the
stories seem like just filler.  The title comes from the first tea he
attended at Princeton.  he didn't know anything about tea so he asked for
both lemon and milk.  His hostess's exclamation provided him with a title
for his book.  The only thing amazing about the incident is that anyone
bothered to remember it.

     The stories in this book are of widely varying interest value, but a
few good stories counterbalance a multitude of "Why are you telling me
this?" tales, like how he got artists' models to pose nude for him.  Overall
not a bad read.


					Mark R. Leeper
					...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper