It was followed after Feynman’s death by another grab bag of stories titled “What Do You Care What Other People Think?,” which also became a bestseller. Feynman!” Assembled by the son of one of his colleagues, this as-told-to book became a bestseller. The Feynman myth began expanding outward to become part of our national heritage in 1985, when he published a collection of autobiographical squibs called “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman-or actually Feynman and his collaborators, since he never really wrote any of the books that bear his name-did a brilliant job of bringing his raucous Broadway patter to the page. The book is ambitious and thorough, but Gleick has a tough assignment when he follows Feynman in retelling stories that the scientist himself had already narrated. He has performed a monumental task of sifting through Feynman’s papers and interviewing many of the important figures in his life. It is Gleick’s aspiration to use Feynman’s life as a window into the history of modern physics, our “modern secular religion,” as Gleick calls it.
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