As this book points out, Richard Feynman didn’t like to engage in formal writing. As this book also points out, he liked to interact with people, to engage them in adventure. What he said in these interactions showed the insight he gained, not only about what he had learned about the operation of the physical world but also about what he had learned about living in that physical world. Fortunately, those insights have been recorded and published in the form of lectures, interviews, and a pair of books of stories told to Ralph Leighton.
None of these books, though, sequences the events of Feynman’s life in chronological order. But collectively they have provided a wealth of information to fulfill a biographer’s wildest dreams. Though several writers have used these resources to weave biographies in ordinary prose, Ottaviani, Myrick, and Sycamore have chosen to do it here in the form of...