The collection of stories presented in this book were truly an inspiration. For those of you unfamiliar with the author, Feynman is a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist. He was on the Manhattan project at Los Alamos and helped to develop the atomic bomb. He went on to profess physics at Cornell, and contributed meaningfully in several other fields.

The stories range from fixing radios as a boy, dealing with hazing when he joined his fraternity, picking safes to obtain confidential documents at Los Alamos, learning how to play the drums, to enjoying hallucinations in a sensory depravation chamber.

Feynman was an amazing person, and this book certainly illustrates it. Throughout, Feynman stresses an important point in education that no one seems to appreciate to this day. When educating, it’s equally important to understand what the content means as it is to understand the content. He gives an example of memorizing a physical law, say of light reflection, without knowing what kinds of real things the law applies to.

One of his stories is actually spent reviewing science texts for elementary students. Needless to say he ends up quite frustrated.

Overall, it was an interesting read. Although Feynman is quite modest in his story telling, a book about such an amazing man still came off as tooting his horn.