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May. 6th, 2010 01:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsLast year I went home and I told my two closest friends from high school that I'd made a resolution that one in every five books I read was going to be nonfiction.
"One in FIVE?" said English Major Friend. "Wow, that's a lot. Good luck!"
"One in FIVE?" said Biology Major Friend. "Isn't that number kind of . . . ridiculously small? Um. Well. Good luck!"
Biology Major Friend also helpfully gave me recommendations; Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmman: Adventures of a Curious Character was one of them. Richard Feynman, for the record, is physicist who worked on the Manhattan Porject and later won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping to develop quantum electrodynamic theory. One would imagine his autobiography would be reasonably serious business. One would be pretty much entirely wrong. If I were to make a pie chart of this book, it would be divided up something like this:
40%: Feynman wanders around gleefully trolling people ("so there was nothing to do at Los Alamos when we weren't working on the bomb, and I was super bored, so I taught myself how to crack safes and then broke into everyone's top-secret documents about the project and left annoying notes so they would think there was a leak! LOL!")
20%: Feynman solves ridiculously complex science/math problems and is like, oh, yeah, so you see that was pretty basic. Pure dumb luck! ("so then I reduced an abacus-seller to tears by how fast I could do cube roots. LOL!")
20%: Feynman decides to take up a new skill and promptly becomes semi-professional at it ("so I went to a nude-drawing class for kicks, and I ended up selling paintings under a pseudonym and having a private exhibition! LOL!")
10%: Feynman gets indignant about intellectual integrity and people not teaching science right ("so I was teaching at this university in Brazil and they asked me to give a speech about my experience, and I got up there and went 'UR DOIN IT WRONG.' LOL!")
10%: Feynman is a dirty old man who hangs out in topless bars (Becca: "Nooooooooooo don't hit on the undergraduates, Feynman! Oh too late. >.<")
Overall, an entertaining read, although occasionally I had to hide my head in shame at all the offhand discussions of science and math that I had to read five times over to make head or tail of while Feynman was like "LOL OBVIOUS".
However, there was one chapter - utterly unrelated to science or math - that made me cringe; that's the chapter where Feynman is like "So I kept buying food and drinks for girls in bars in Mexico! And none of them ended up sleeping with me! THAT IS SO UNFAIR, being a gentleman so does not pay out." I mean, in a way, I am kind of grateful for that chapter, because now if anyone ever asks me why I'm uncomfortable with guys paying for my food and drink and flat-out refuse to accept it . . . that's it. That's it right there.
"One in FIVE?" said English Major Friend. "Wow, that's a lot. Good luck!"
"One in FIVE?" said Biology Major Friend. "Isn't that number kind of . . . ridiculously small? Um. Well. Good luck!"
Biology Major Friend also helpfully gave me recommendations; Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmman: Adventures of a Curious Character was one of them. Richard Feynman, for the record, is physicist who worked on the Manhattan Porject and later won the Nobel Prize in physics for helping to develop quantum electrodynamic theory. One would imagine his autobiography would be reasonably serious business. One would be pretty much entirely wrong. If I were to make a pie chart of this book, it would be divided up something like this:
40%: Feynman wanders around gleefully trolling people ("so there was nothing to do at Los Alamos when we weren't working on the bomb, and I was super bored, so I taught myself how to crack safes and then broke into everyone's top-secret documents about the project and left annoying notes so they would think there was a leak! LOL!")
20%: Feynman solves ridiculously complex science/math problems and is like, oh, yeah, so you see that was pretty basic. Pure dumb luck! ("so then I reduced an abacus-seller to tears by how fast I could do cube roots. LOL!")
20%: Feynman decides to take up a new skill and promptly becomes semi-professional at it ("so I went to a nude-drawing class for kicks, and I ended up selling paintings under a pseudonym and having a private exhibition! LOL!")
10%: Feynman gets indignant about intellectual integrity and people not teaching science right ("so I was teaching at this university in Brazil and they asked me to give a speech about my experience, and I got up there and went 'UR DOIN IT WRONG.' LOL!")
10%: Feynman is a dirty old man who hangs out in topless bars (Becca: "Nooooooooooo don't hit on the undergraduates, Feynman! Oh too late. >.<")
Overall, an entertaining read, although occasionally I had to hide my head in shame at all the offhand discussions of science and math that I had to read five times over to make head or tail of while Feynman was like "LOL OBVIOUS".
However, there was one chapter - utterly unrelated to science or math - that made me cringe; that's the chapter where Feynman is like "So I kept buying food and drinks for girls in bars in Mexico! And none of them ended up sleeping with me! THAT IS SO UNFAIR, being a gentleman so does not pay out." I mean, in a way, I am kind of grateful for that chapter, because now if anyone ever asks me why I'm uncomfortable with guys paying for my food and drink and flat-out refuse to accept it . . . that's it. That's it right there.
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Date: 2010-05-06 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 06:39 pm (UTC)I am getting more and more intrigued by this book! And definitely putting it on my list. There's also a movie coming up about the Challenger disaster, isn't there? With somebody slated to play Feynman?
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Date: 2010-05-06 06:50 pm (UTC)David Strathairn, apparently? It's categorized as "in production" with incredibly few details available about it, but also apparently it's coming out this year? That makes me think it's stuck in development hell.
Oh, also, if you're reading nonfiction books, can I recommend Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's autobiography? It's out-of-print, but used copies are available (like here (http://www.betterworldbooks.com/Cecilia-Payne-Gaposchkin-id-0521483905.aspx)), and if you can find it in your library, I highly recommend it. She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard, and she talks a lot about women in astronomy at the time (1920s-1950s).
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Date: 2010-05-06 07:05 pm (UTC)Oh, thaaat explains why I had never heard of it until I went to scan Feyman's wikipedia page! Yeah, you're probably right, which is a shame - I would have loved to see that.
Dude, I always welcome recommendations, especially nonfiction recs (because I am not as good at finding those for myself), and I will absolutely check my library for it! That sounds seriously fascinating.