★★★☆☆ Good on the facts, relentlessly infuriating interpretation

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

James Gleick

I read James Gleick's Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman not long after it came out in 1993. I read it because of my interest in Feynman, but I went into it with some trepidation, because I had read Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science, and I did NOT like it. Here is what I think of Gleick: he's a writer who thinks he's smarter than his readers. He is not content to give you just the facts and allow you to draw your own conclusions -- he wants to have INSIGHTS, which he insists on pressing on you in such a way as to cause you to marvel at his, Gleick's, brilliance.

But I will say this for him -- he's a thorough researcher. If you want the facts about something and can ignore Gleick's insights, you may benefit from reading him. I learned things about Feynman that I didn't know before reading Genius.

Gleick's deep insight about Feynman is that he worked to present a certain image of himself, as a physics genius. What this really comes down to is that Feynman liked to brag. If you have followed Feynman's writings and public lectures you know this already. He was not subtle, and his friends and colleagues will tell you the same. That Gleick treats this as a deep insight about Feynman says much more about Gleick than about Feynman.

Genius is a good source of information about Feynman. Like any nonfiction book, it should be approached with skepticism.

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