Huh.

Feynman is clearly an interesting character and a significant influence in modern science. His antics are interesting is this collection, and It was just as interesting to travel back to a different era through this storytelling.

He does come across as a bit pompous at times, perhaps another blast from the past. Overall an interesting read. ( )

Richard Feynman is definitely an admirable fellow. He's extremely intelligent and has an enviable work ethic. Some of the stories in this book are fascinating illuminations on times and places I know little about. His voice in prose is not very appealing to me, however.

I'm not sure what it is that bothers me about the way he talks or writes (I gather from the preface that these stories are essentially dicatations). Heather felt he was caddish, and it's clear that he had a fascination with women. For me, though, these elements of the stories are not that remarkable giving the age he was living through. Guys just seemed to act that way during the middle of the century. Maybe I felt like his casual tone was a bit forced.

He's obviously brilliant, but he also sees himself as a straight shooter that likes to cut through the usual tangle of academic obfuscation. I guess I still felt an undercurrent of arrogance along with a bit too much bragging. Maybe I just envy his achievements; I don't know.

In any case, the material is good and pretty consistently entertaining. The most valuable element for me was the window on mid-century academic life. ( )

Dnf. No doubt Mr Feynman was incredibly smart and a great teacher, but in this book he mostly comes off as an insufferable know-it-all who delights in being a tiresome asshole. ( )

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

What an interesting personality. Will read more of his works. ( )

Feynman OP! ( )

This is one of those books that's had an effect on me immediately - Feynman was apparently a very sensible person, and I hope that I remember the things I read in this book. ( )

It´s hard to find a person with such a fabulous life. How did he do that? Because Mr. Feynman lived a life devoted to learning: he always would try new hobbies and new experiments just to amuse himself. That´s why he did physics: to play, to relieve his scientific inquiry, and not to win the Nobel Prize. He was mischievous, didn´t like flattery nor luxuries, seeking simplicity instead. All of what he did can be boiled down to:

“I'd watch the girls dance, do a little physics, prepare a lecture, or draw a little bit.” ( )

Smart and funny but went on a little too long. This has been on my "read someday" list for a long time so maybe I was expecting too much. ( )

Probably the best memoir/or collection of personal stories I've ever read. I enjoyed it so much more than I expected I would. Did the stories make me cringe sometimes? Yes. But it wasn't arrogance that I was bothered by, as I've seen him accused of in many reviews. It was brutal, uncensored honesty.

This book was interesting on a couple levels. I was interesting for the stories he tells, the man has had a fascinating life. The stories of the Manhattan Project alone are worth the price. But for me, this book was really about two things:
Feynman's views on learning - the joy of discovering something new, the importance of scientific rigor, keeping learning relevant, etc.
Feyman's views on living life - you are not beholden to someone else's expectations, explore your interests, do what you like, don't expect to be good right away, learn from others, speak your mind, etc.

Highly recommended. ( )

I viewed Surely You're Joking, My Feynman! as a companion to Six Easy Pieces (a perennial TBR), and chose to read it beforehand: this decision was more productive than anticipated.

I've long been interested in Feynman's reported talent for presenting difficult and detailed science concepts in clear and innovative ways, but hadn't got around to reading his books or screening videos of his lectures. Receiving Joking as a gift prompted me to read it, and that lead to reading 6EP immediately after.

There is no particular necessity for reading this first. The payout for me was twofold: first, having a "big picture" into which I could place the specifics of his very focused lectures from 6EP. This fits with my predilection for Top Down thinking, so appealing but in no way providing missing information. The more nuanced and rewarding aspect, though, was in a heightened appreciation for Feynman's gadfly approach to life, and seeing how his scientific outlook (on physics and problems of engineering) is itself shot through with that same irreverence. A significant part of the nuance comes from insight into Feynman's clownish sense of humour, which is present in the physics lectures but very understated, and seems of a piece with his abiding curiosity about everything: social interactions, natural phenomena, pedagogy, mathematics.

I also didn't anticipate that Joking, the "easier" read of the two books, took longer. It's hundreds of pages and covers a wide swath of Feynman's life -- though evidently there's another volume to these (transcribed) memoirs. ( )

Brilliant! Probably the most fun and entertaining audiobook this year.
One of the brightest minds in science world shares anecdotes from his life with his point of view and background of each situation.

Having dedicated most of his life for science (and having the urge to question everything) Feynman was not very familiar with usual social standards and norms which brings lots of interesting stories and (for some) the desire to question more things yourself.

The most fascinating for me about Feynman as a personality is that small life events (which many wouldn't even notice) trigger the desire to understand inner workings of the field and even master it. From opening safes and finding his own methods to calculate integrals to learning new languages, art or music. Very inspiring for a geek minded people! ( )

i didn't really read this, but goodreads won't let you choose "read some of this and decided to throw it against a wall but then realized i was in a library and it's not cool to throw library books against a wall ..." i only got through one essay, chosen at random, because i've been curious about this book for a while. i had some time in the library one day and decided to attend to that curiosity. here's my re-enactment of said essay:

people don't think because they don't think the same way i do! that's ridiculous! maybe i should fuck with some poor working-class girl and then laugh when my little experiment makes a mess because she doesn't think (the same way i do)! that means she doesn't think! here, let me fuck with some other people who don't think (the same way i do)! it's funny when i'm an asshole! aren't you amused?!?

um ... no. no, i'm not. i wanted to give it another shot, to see if it was just that essay, but just glancing through the rest of it i kept encountering other quick glimpses of self-aggrandising "merriment" and i put it back on the shelf. ( )

So I read this book on the recommendation of a friend who said it would be a good read. And it's true, this is a good read, but it's sort of a 'fun read' - to learn more about the personality of Feynman, assuming you know who that is. I didn't find there's much to learn in the book, nothing that you can apply in life.

Overall, this book is filled with anecdotes and short stories about Feynman who turns out to be quite the joker in life [Ha - who'd ever figure that out from a physics prof!]

All the anecdotes involve him discovering some hidden talent like:-

Radio construction and repair.
Playing bongo drums.
Painting and drawing nude women
Cracking safes
Building a damn atom bomb
Pissing while doing a headstand [in order to prove something about gravity]
Watching ants and trying to figure out whether they actually follow a trail or not



Here's my 2 cents on the book:

Firstly, do some research on who the heck is R P Feynman [if you don't already]. I had no idea, I just starting listening to the audio because it was recommended by a friend... that was probably my mistake for not doing any research on RPF

If you're looking for something you can apply to life, you won't find much in this book [though I have a few mentioned down below]

Pro Tip: Listen to the audiobook, rather than read the book. The narrator is really awesome and his sound effects really make you LOL!

In terms of what I learnt from this book

Be Curious and experiment: This was one of the striking themes in the book. He was curious on how radios worked, curious on how ants moved around illogically towards sugar but still managed to find their path back home, curious about learning to play the bongo drums [He played the bongos in a Brazilian band because he mentioned to a man in the US Embassy that he wanted to learn more about Brazilian music], curious about how to crack a safe, curious on how to draw, curious as to why none of the guys are able to pick up women in a bar etc.. His curiosity led him into a wonderful world that ultimately led to the stories in this book.

You can connect the dots looking backwards: He sold the paintings he drew, which only happened because he practiced painting naked women. That only happened because someone suggested he take a course. That only happened because she saw him practicing [quite pathetically] some drawings that his friend Jerry taught him. Same with how he managed to get the documents out of a Army General's safe.. it was because he became good at cracking safes, which only happened because he wanted to prove that the safes were not secure enough to keep important documents!

Not afraid of criticizing —He criticized the Brazilian system which relied overmuch on memorization by rote, and concentrated overmuch on passing tests, instead of teaching students how to make sense of the world around them. He also mentioned, while reviewing books for the school system how he couldn't review a particular book because there were some pages blank in between. Turns out the others who reviewed the book didn't even notice that there were blank pages / didn't care that there were blank pages and still gave ratings to such books [and those books went into the school education system]



OVERALL RATING:
I'd give this a a 3.7 / 5. Don't spend money on this, rather download an audiobook or a pdf / kindle version. ( )

In which a nobel prize winner proves once and for all that a childlike curiosity about everything, a good sense of humor, and being an honest-to-god genius will get you a lot of places in this world. I did enjoy this memoir (set up as a series of funny stories), but some of the stories are a lot better than others. Five stars for the chapters on Los Alamos, though (especially the safe-cracking one - great story). The biggest downside is you'll cry a little at the end because you're not Richard Feynman, and you never will be. ( )

Mir absolut rätselhaft, wie so viele Menschen hier dieses Buch lieben können. Nicht nur, dass ich es nicht gut fand, ich fand es sogar schlecht und las es nur fertig, weil ich dachte, das kann doch nicht alles sein.

Um ehrlich zu sein, wusste ich bis dato so gut wie gar nichts über Richard Feynman, außer das Physiker war und den entsprechenden Nobelpreiserhalten hatte (Kudos dafür - seinem Werk will und kann ich ja gar nichts absprechen). Leider erinnere ich mich nicht mehr, wie das Buch auf meiner Leseliste gelandet ist, aber da es nun mal da war, wurde es auch gelesen.

In loser Abfolge erzählt Feynmann Anekdoten aus seinem Leben: Von der Geburt bis zum Nobelpreis. Leider sind die Anekdoten größtenteils überhaupt nicht witzig, sondern zeugen davon wie blöd alle anderen sind und was für ein toller Hecht Feynman ist. Sei es, wenn es ums Abschleppen, Sambatrommeln oder Safeknacken geht - ein wahrer Tausendsasse.

Ich hätte mich über etwas mehr Selbstreflektion gefreut. ( )

An anecdotal self-summarisation of the myth that became Richard Feynman. ( )

Odlična knjiga katastrofalnog prijevoda i lekture. ( )

Feynman, Richard. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character. As told to Ralph Leighton. 1985. Norton, 2018.
Several years before his death in 1988, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman narrated some stories of his life to a friend with a tape recorder. Most of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is the result of these interviews. They do not create a full biography, but they do give some insight into aspects of Feynman’s personality. One realizes that he was almost always the smartest person in the room, even though he could be intimidated by the prestige of some of his colleagues. As a child he tinkered creatively with all things electronic, and one could imagine him being an excellent engineer, if he had not had such a powerful interest in the math of theoretical physics, where he made things as hands on as possible. His insistence on not accepting received wisdom until he had worked the problems out by his own methods offers a clue to his originality. His humor is everywhere apparent. He could be something of a smart-aleck and was an inveterate practical joker, cracking safes and picking locks in the paranoid environment of the Los Alamos. His satirical account of trying to talk to academic philosophers is hilarious, as is account of his trouble reading Shakespeare. But we also get some hint that music and art eventually became important to him. His chapter on how he learned to seduce women in bars suggests that he was a typical frat-boy of his era. His male chauvinism seems more playful than cruel, and he eventually became a defender of women physicists. We get little of his emotional life from these stories—how he felt about losing his first wife to tuberculosis or his divorce from his second wife. Near the end, he tells us how winning the Nobel Prize interfered with his ability to talk to his colleagues, why school textbooks and pedagogical methods in math and science are so dreadful, and what dangers lurk in what he calls “Cargo Cult Science”—a topic that seems more relevant to life in the twenty-first century than the twentieth. Feynman was, as Tom Wolfe called himself, “a man in full.” 5 stars. ( )

Great title for Feynman. He is a pretty funny guy. You can read between the lines for those quirks, but this is a nice example of an autobiographical essay. It sort of peters out at the end and doesn't end up going anywhere, but the ride was interesting. ( )

read many years ago ( )

This has been on The List for a long time and finally took the time to read it. I am familiar with Feynmen's brilliance, and somewhat with his whimsy but this was enlightening. His revealed character flaws were incongruous with some of his strong character traits, but the last thing he would have wanted is deification so, warts and all, he was human. I liked the essays/articles/descriptions of his scientific investigations and his time at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, and was entertained by his curiosity - safe-cracking? Love it!

More than anything, I liked

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way–by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

Memorization is not understanding.

Anyway, this prompted me to pick up The Quotable Feynman, and I have decided to work my way through his massive three-volume lectures on physics. 42 years ago I started out majoring in physics, switching because I was too immature to understand that I had to have the ... understanding ... before I could get to the "good stuff". Time to close the circle. ( )

Definitely an interesting read (and brief) but Feynman can be repetitive and a bit of a braggart. Worth reading if you're interested in physics, science, famous scientists, or intriguing little one off stories. Personally I enjoyed a play on similar subject matter, Q. E. D., much better. This is so breezy and wacky though that it's hard to not like it. ( )

I'll just start off by saying I'm not a genius. Now that we have that out of the way, I'll admit that this book brought up all kinds of feelings for me. First off, I don't know squat about physics. Math was never my strong suit. And logical thinking? Um, no.

But, Feynman's brilliance in these areas (I'll take his, and other people's, word for it) was not what makes this an interesting book for me. It's not even his quirkiness. His experiences playing the drums, spending time in a sensory deprivation tank, safe cracking, and defending topless bars have varying levels of charm for me, ranging from quite charming to quite less-than charming. They were interesting and amusing at best and bemusing at worst. I realize the mid-twentieth century was a different time with different cultural mores, but as a female, the whole topless bar thing makes me a bit uncomfortable.

About halfway through the book, I was ready to lay it aside. He was starting to come across as tiresomely brilliant if that makes sense. But something had me continue with it and I'm glad I did. To me, his stories became more interesting the older he got. And the very last chapter? story? speech? was the best part of the entire book in my opinion. Because when I finished it, I had read, not just about a genius, but about a human being. Feynman comes across as someone that seems to be increasingly rare in these days of gaslighting. He was an honest man with a deep love of science and truth.

Someone who reads the book with an understanding of physics and Feynman's legacy will likely get a lot more out of it than I did. But his joy in his experiences and his integrity in career made the book worth the time. ( )

Not what I thought it was. More a collection of tales with large parts missing from his life, and not always in order. Laughed out loud a few times. I can see how some people might see it as too "braggy" and self centered but it's literally his stories. For example saying he is good at the drums. Who cares if he is actually good or not, the story is his drumming was used as the music of a ballet - and that is a wacky, interesting story. Not a deep look into a person's life like a biography, more like a collection of movie trailers. ( )

This book was recommended to me by my husband, and I read it in an attempt to broaden my horizons. Dr. Feynman is very blunt and funny, so it was an enjoyable read, especially because I work in STEM. I wonder how such a brilliant physicist had time to play bongos, hang out with prostitutes in vegas, and learn Portuguese. I also wonder if I would have been happier not knowing that a novel prize winner visited his local strip club 5-6 times a week. The world will never know. ( )