Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

2.5/5. This was a really difficult and complex book to rate, probably because Feynman is a really complex character. If this book had purely been him explaining Physics concepts, it would almost certainly have rated a lot higher. But it isn't. As a disclaimer, I'm completely new to Feynman. I only very vaguely know of his name because some equation or other has probably been named after him, and that's about it. I didn't even know about his involvement in the Manhattan Project (or, indeed, that it was named the Manhattan Project).

This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes, almost randomly chaptered and vaguely chronologically ordered, of events in Feynman's life that he found worth noting down. These are also not the key events however - he only talks obliquely about the Manhattan Project in its core, he doesn't even mention what project it was that earned him the Nobel Prize, and he also hardly dwells on some events that had affected him deeply, such as the untimely death of his first wife Arlene from tuberculosis. Rather, Feynman just talks on about the pranks he played on everyone or the various disciplines that he randomly decided to try out and excel at.

This was a structural flaw of the book that I struggled to move past at the very beginning. I found it difficult to follow. Stories would end and I'd feel like there hadn't been a point to the story. I couldn't grasp the timeline because Feynman, though following some vague chronological order, would quite frequently jump to a different time in his life in the middle of another anecdote to make a point. This wasn't as much of a struggle as the book went on, but I'm not sure if I just simply got used to it or if Feynman's anecdotes got more orderly as he reminisced on more recent events of his life, such as his life in Caltech after his PhD.

So since this book doesn't invite us to assess Feynman on what he's best known for—the easy explanations of difficult concepts—I can only judge him based on the values that he's showing us here, and it is difficult. As with any person, Feynman has his virtues and flaws, but oh boy are those flaws hard to read today in 2022, particularly his attitudes and behaviour towards women. While reading this book, I constantly struggled with the dilemma of whether it was fair to judge him based on a 21st century lens given that he did not grow up or was aware of the values in the 21st century, or whether I should take him as a product of his times. I'm inclined towards the latter, but some of the stories in this book makes the former really hard to ignore.

In “You Just Ask Them”, Feynman talks about a period where he decides to “start seeing people”, basically engaging in a lot of casual hook-ups, after his first wife's death. He talks about how someone gave him tips on how to “get something” (i.e. sex) from these “bar girls” without having to buy them drinks. “Treat them with disrespect”, he was told. He tried it out because he was curious like that, and it worked. But he says he never continued it because it wasn't his thing. Nevertheless, though, this whole chapter was uncomfortable to read because of how it only seemed like he treated the women he met here as just puzzle objects to win sex from by different strategies.

More troubling is the chapter “But Is It Art?”. Feynman dabbles in drawing and painting and supposedly excels in it enough to sell some of his works. The whole process of him practising drawing was interesting enough, coming from a physicist who had never before thought he would exhibit any kind of proficiency in art, but it was after that, his fixation of drawing nude (female) models that was really bizarre and uncomfortable. When he was in art classes drawing from nude models, he usually drew from “heavy and out of shape models”, but then only got interested in perfecting the drawing when a “nifty”, “well proportioned” blonde model came in. He says, “...with the other [heavier] models, if you draw something a little too big or a bit too small, it doesn't make any difference because it's all out of shape anyway”, but with the blonde, he felt the need to draw more perfectly in order to capture her beauty. That sounds incredibly dehumanizing to basically any woman out there who doesn't fit into the narrow standards of what is considered a ‘beautiful' physique, a problem that still plagues women and harms their self-image all the time everyday in this day and age. Further, he asks his undergrad students whether they would pose nude for him, when he was a professor at Caltech. If you think that's weird, there are bits where he would pretend to be an undergrad student himself to hook up with these undergrads at bars when he was a young professor. Now, I appreciate that these were wildly different times with different value systems from what we consider correct now, so the question here is how much should we excuse historical figures? If we excuse Feynman because he's just “a product of his times” then to be consistent we should also excuse the behaviour of men in other cultures from other time periods (say, ancient China) because they too were a product of their misogynistic times.

Another troubling point of that chapter is when he talks about how he imagines Madame Curie but bases her on a nude blonde model. “The message I intended to convey was, nobody thinks of Madame Curie as a woman, as feminine, with beautiful hair, bare breasts, and all that. They only think of the radium part.” I'm not in STEM, but I'm superficially aware that women in STEM have long been faced with sexual discrimination and harrassment by men in the field who treat them as objects only worth sexualizing and not to be taken seriously as scientists. There are any number of articles written about this that you can search up. It's therefore pretty problematic that Feynman would even sexualize Marie Curie, a two time Nobel Prize-winning scientist, just because she is a woman. Now I'm not against women owning sexualities and posing nude if they want to. But I certainly wouldn't want anyone to tell me how to express my femininity, or take it into their hands and decide to imagine me nude just because they think it's the best way to express my femininity according to their standards. It feels incredibly reductive and objectifying, especially saying that people shouldn't just think about “the radium part”, never mind that it was the passion project that Madame Curie literally devoted her life and death to.

Feynman undoubtedly went through a lot more emotional turmoil than he let on in this book. I'm not sure how much that excuses the harmful attitudes that he shows towards women here, given that this is written in his words from a first-person POV. He seems to be reinforcing systematic misogyny towards women in his own field, despite having just broken through systematic antisemitism towards himself earlier on in his career. I might've enjoyed this book a lot more if he had been more upfront about his emotional struggles, which apparently he did have but which was not alluded to in this book at all. Instead, the book sounds like someone who only wants to look back at the “light-hearted” parts of his life and pretend the emotional parts didn't exist. I'm not sure how much of it is the idea of masculinity he grew up with (he talks a lot about how “real men” should behave), and how much is that he was still unwilling to confront the emotional struggles that he dealt with in his life. For people who are new to Feynman, it's really a toss-up how much you'd like him from this book. As it is, the only reason why I'm on the fence at all is because I searched up some videos of him explaining physics concepts and he is such a charismatic and effective teacher. If I had based my impression solely on this book, it would certainly have rated lower than my current score.