All you want to hear is already in the first book.

Not worth listening if you have already gone through "Surely you're joking...". and if not listen that instead. A lot of repetition and new material is not anything special.

16 people found this helpful

How children should be raised

What made the experience of listening to The Pleasure of Finding Things Out the most enjoyable?

Inspiring and vivid stories, full of insights into life, human behaviour, raising children, and nature...

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out?

Melville Feynman's deep understanding of inertia, and the way he explained it to his son

What does Sean Runnette bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?

Colour

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The story about Arlene.

Any additional comments?

There is some overlap with other books, such as 'What do you care what other people think?'

3 people found this helpful

Old. Out dated. With some sparks of insights

Don’t expect epiphanies. There is some interesting thoughts and stories about his father. Most the stories are written 40 years ago so it’s outdated, not only technically but also socially. Shockingly outdated are expressions about the “female mind”. Valuable are the opinion on education and scientific methods. This book might be interesting to someone that will be a father/mother, though she/he would have to skim out a bit of tech-memorabilia.

1 person found this helpful

captivating

as is always the case with works by or about Richard P. Feynman. Highly recommended!

One of the best book i read

the narrator was good and i really understood alot how we act as humans and how easy it is to cross the line between good and bad (Los Alamos)

Repeat of Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman

After have read Surely you must be joking Mr Feynman this book is much of a repeat.

Underwhelming compared with "Surely.." & "What.."

Severely lacking in content when compared with the other 2 books of assembled stories and interviews.

Classic short works by Feynman

The great physicist Richard Feynman tells many stories here including the legendary battle with the censors of Los Alamos, his research into safebreaking and many others.

very challenging but enjoyable

Loved the intelligence and narrative style. Makes characters come alive and yells the story of theoretical Physics. Hardest part is Feynemann's misogynistic outlook. Just shows that even the greatest intellects and storytellers are prone to accept values and beliefs that have no basis in fact. Don't let this spoil the book for you. It's worth every minute.

A fair insight into Feynman but a poor adaptation

This collection of talks, interviews and articles does a fair job of giving insight into the inner working of Feynman's mind.

It's obvious from these works that Feynman had a great talent for science, however it also shines a small light into the other parts of his personality, not always flattering and I wish this small light had a greater intensity. An undertone of jarring sexism pervades throughout, with numerous mentions of "great men", with an unexpected mention of how he thought women's mind incapable of analytical thought… shocker. The book only touches lightly on his ethics, whereby he acknowledged that the people (he'll say men, but they weren't just men) working on the Manhattan Project (developing the atomic bomb) could have stopped what they were doing once Hitler was defeated, but didn't because they didn't stop to think. He failed to really acknowledge any responsibility for that project in bringing about the nuclear world we now live in, or to really explore the topic, which would have been interesting.

Despite a lecture given on Galileo's birthday extolling the thought process Galileo had put in place, I found Feynman could not help but revel in the authorities of his age, these "great men", very aristotelian.

There is a little repetition within the book, but only because a few of the essays, lectures and interviews have a little crossover in their subject areas. I found this helped to remember some of the stories, personally, and so it didn't bother me, ok. (Tee hee – classic Feynman sentence ending right there.)

On the adaptation itself – I found it came up short. Some audiobook production companies seem to think adapting a book to audiobook is merely asking someone to read the book out loud, and if this were the case I would say Sean Runnette does a good job. However, having the same person reading an interview between two people fell flat. Some of it may have been the adaptation of the source material itself, but having someone repeat Feynman's word saying so-and-so "was so high", I knew Feynman would have been demonstrating just how high it was… a decent adaptation would have interjected with a description. As it was, it meant I had no idea what he was talking about in that moment.

It is popular in today's society to hold these scientists up on a pedestal to extoll their greatness, as if they had a hand in it themselves. From what I understand, Feynman did great science using the talents he was fortunate enough to be born with. In other aspects of his life he seems to me to be as flawed as the rest of us.