-by Richard Feynman
To start with, book along with being extremely inspirational is also strangely extremely humorous.
Intelligence had always fascinated me and so I find myself reading about intelligent people.Although I am still not sure what are the criterias which ensures that a particular man belongs to a specific grade of intelligence but after knowing about the Howard Gardner theory of multiple Intelligences one thing is sure, everyone is intelligent in one or other field. Intelligence traditionally is primarily associated to scientists, so I stumbled upon this book on a very famous and curious character Richard Feynman-he won a noble award in physics.
The book is so inspiring that you actually dont feel like putting the book down, you feel like going and doing something, anything to make yourself a bit moreintelligent because the freedom and pleasures that he experiences owing to his intelligence makes one really jealous.
Like every autobiographical book, it starts with the description of his childhood wherein his curious character makes him famous as 'the child who could repair radios just by thinking!!'. He describes many incidents where he tries to reason and change things to accomplish his end in his very own peculiar way. Some experiments succeed while others turn out to be disastrous, nonetheless he continues with the experiments describing everything in a very humorous way.
His interest in drawing and music adds color to his character. His curious nature with readiness to experiment with anything(he conducts experiments even with ants, plays around with locks),outgoing personality, mathematical genius and a mischievous attitude combines to create a lot of interesting events. He refusal to accept the conventional, frankness in pointing out faults and problem solving attitude makes him stand out of the ordinary.
His love for teaching, the faults in textbooks and his way to infer students real understanding are a joy to read.
Finally, I think that if I had read this book earlier during my college days it would surely have helped me be a better learner.So especially for technical folks this is a must read.
Note: - Looking at the book one might get impression that it is a pure technical book but it is not, So don’t miss reading it under this wrong impression as sufficient effort is made to keep it simple for normal reader.
-Anwar Sahib
