Feynman Volume I

Rating:
Summary: Can't wait to get vol. II
Review: "Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is based on these tape recordings. Given his particular style of giving out ideas, it is always a better idea to listen to him 'in action' than just to read books. Included in a ``secret track'' is his unique experience with carbon tet. This story has never been published before.

Rating:
Summary: Can't wait to get vol. II
Review: "Surely Your Joking, Mr. Feynman!" is based on these tape recordings. Given his particular style of giving out ideas, it is always a better idea to listen to him 'in action' than just to read books. Included in a ``secret track'' is his unique experience with carbon tet. This story has never been published before.

Rating:
Summary: A purist won't grant something else for Feynman's Stories
Review: Though Feynman died a pretty long time ago, an interesting phenomena, may be unique to him, is that he is constantly writing and publishing new books! That's because Feynman's bestsellers--the set of lectures given at Caltech, "Surely you're Joking", "What do you care?", "QED", and some others--were not written by him, though he is recognised being the author by everybody, including himself for those books published before he died. Actually as you certainly know, these books were edited by other peoples from audio tapes, which tapes were recorded for such or such occasion, lectures, TV, or for private use. That means Feynman told something that has been recorded, and somebody else rearranged it, added, cut, modified the grammar and the speech, moved the text around, to make a book out of it.

For that matter, no one feels peculiarly wrong when editing books signed Richard P. Feynman, books he never knew he had written. It may seems fair as long as the editor stays close enough to Feynman's ideas, and most often it's okay in this regard... but some will always feel uneasy with somehow translated text.

Feynman encouraged it when he was alive, and as an author of much success, they're keeping up the good work, till exhaustion of lost lectures it seems. Whether one feels this is morally good or wrong, there remains these original unarguable sources of this sounding fake literature. It happens you can get some of theses tapes! For those who have enjoyed the books, for you all, this is incredibly enough _better_ stuff.

This one record, Feynman Volume 1, has been home recorded by Ralph Leighton after sessions of drumming with Feynman, pieces of which are incidentally included. In this first volume, we hear Feynman telling theses four stories that are entitled in "Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman" as "The Chief Research Chemist of the Metaplast Corporation", "I Want My Dollar!", "Thirteen Times" and "Judging Books by Their Covers". Stories as they're told sometime differ radically from stories as they're written. Those episodes that are hundred of pages separated in the book are actually recounted in an uninterrupted one hour and a minute delightful story, of a true Feynman _unedited_.

Praise that audio sources from Feynman will keep on being released. If peoples feel the need for a book coming with them, they're welcome (and most often when it's technical, yes, it's necessary). But books without their actual source, and even though it's the way Feynman was "writing". should be disregarded.