In the post-Sputnik clays of educational reform, Feynman was out in front criticizing the new math as utterly useless formalism (unless you could use it to explain to kids different orders of infinity). That, and a no-nonsense attitude that despised pretension, lofty language, and rote learning. There are wit and playfulness, yes, but what shines through is Richard Feynman's commitment to probe nature, a restlessness to understand why things happen, and the joy and beauty he felt when science yielded an answer - and that is the key to understanding what drove Feynman throughout his life. Readers whose appetites were whetted by the as-told-to collections of anecdotes in the Ralph Leighton books (Tuva or Bust!, 1991, etc.) will find gratification of a different kind here. That's only one of the many pithy descriptions that Gleick (Chaos, 1987) quotes in this fine, monumental biography of a monumental figure in 20th-century physics. He is a second Dirac, Princeton's Eugene Wigner said, only this time human. Gleck's account fully deserves its title' GUARDIAN 'A rich narrative that mixes science with fly-on-the-wall detail' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
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