From the Stacks: Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"

Genre
Nonfiction - Essays

Escape experience
Ever wonder what's it like to see the world through the eyes of a great genius? Read this book to rediscover and reaffirm that life, with all its fleeting and often unexpected moments, is a wonderful, glorious gift.

Read this if you're into...
Wearing Sheldon t-shirts (you know: those geeky but decidedly cool looks from "Big Bang Theory"), under either a hoodie or a tweed jacket, along with vintage straight-legged jeans and tastefully tattered sneaks. On your wrist, you sport a night-glow digital watch, made from recycled materials. You also love playing on bongo drums or just about any kind of percussion instrument. In short, you're an unconventional, bright, free-spirited individual (emphasis on "individual") who's got the gumption to be your own genuine self and to live life to its very fullest. Your motto is carpe every single diem!

Plot
This is a collection of Feynman's best short essays and transcripts, delivered in quintessential Feynmanese, on a wide array of topics: Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project; science and religion; doubt and uncertainty; and a delightful set of annecdotes about his father, teaching a young, impressionable Richard about the wonders of nature, awakening in him the pleasure of finding things out.

Pace: Reading this is like walking in a pair of...    
Comfortable-to-the-nth-degree Keds sneakers, strolling through the neighborhood, alert and tuned to even the faintest flutter of a dragonfly wing, beating to its own life rhythm.

Cast of characters
Richard P. Feynman - Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in quantum electrodynamics. A truly lovely man who geniunely cared about his fellow man and embraced every facet of life (including the experience of his own death), yet ironically assisted in the development of the atom bomb.

Books by Richard Feynman

• The Pleasure of Finding Things Out 
• The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist 
• Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! 
• Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character 
• Tuva or Bust!: Richard Feynman's Last Journey 

You might also like

• James Gleick - Genius, a biography of Richard P. Feynman
• Sylvia Nasar - A Beautiful Mind, a biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash

Strictly for burgeoning physicists

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Website and book