Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman

I finished this book (for the second time, but I own it now) the other day. Richard Feynman got a physics BS from MIT, Ph.D. from Princeton, worked on The Bomb at Los Alamos, taught at Cornell and CalTech and won the Nobel Prize in 1965 and gave perhaps the most famous physics talk ever, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" about nanotechnology.

This book is about as little of that stuff as possible. It turns out that Dick Feynman was an amazing man who liked to pull pranks, make jokes, and this is the story of all that stuff. Mostly, Feynman was unable to look at something and not want to know how it works, why it works and how to make it better. He taught himself to crack safes in Los Alamos, competed in a samba competition during Carnival in Rio, took commissions for art work, and played the drums for a San Francisco ballet.

The book is basically a collection of all of these stories, and is rather like sitting down in his company and listening to his many adventures. It's non-technical, and rather than being a book about physics, is a book about a physicist. Shannon is reading it now, so maybe you'll want to wait to hear what she thinks.