[In the following review, Dyson offers a positive assessment of Genius.]

Six years ago Richard Rhodes published his historical study, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Like most of my friends, I thought the last thing the world needed was another fat book about the atomic bomb. But it turned out that Rhodes had done his homework and gone back to primary sources; he discovered a wealth of new facts that the earlier books had missed. I was forced to reverse my initial judgment. After all, the world did need a comprehensive and reliable history of the atomic bomb, and Rhodes had supplied it.

My initial reaction to James Gleick's new book [Genius] was the same. After three books by Ralph Leighton and all the other published reminiscences of Feynman's life and work, who needs another book about Feynman? And again, after reading the book, I changed my mind. Like Rhodes, Gleick has made an extraordinarily thorough investigation of primary sources. He has interviewed a multitude of people who were involved with Feynman at every period of his life from beginning to end, including family, childhood friends, colleagues, students, government officials and medical doctors. He has had access to early personal notes and correspondence that amplify and sometimes correct the stories Feynman remembered many years later. Gleick has assembled out of this material a portrait of Feynman far more complete and authentic than any of the earlier accounts. Although I am a longtime friend and admirer of Feynman, I feel that I know him better after reading this book than I did before.

In a brief review I can mention only two aspects of the book that I found particularly illuminating. First, the picture of Feynman's family background and childhood in Far Rockaway is grittier and bleaker than the idyllic stories that Feynman told later. Feynman remembered his father as a kindly philosopher whose profound words shaped Feynman's own way of understanding the natural world around him. In reality, Feynman's father was a harassed and unsuccessful businessman who was forced to travel to earn a living and had little time left over for his children. The fact that Feynman could create a legend of the philosopher-father out of such a meagre reality is an important clue to understanding his character. One of the most valuable lessons I learned as a student of Feynman was a rule that he applied whenever a question about priority of discovery threatened to arise. Feynman's rule was to “always give them more credit than they deserve.” Feynman consistently applied this rule throughout his life, and it saved him from many time-consuming irritations. It now appears that, consciously or unconsciously, he applied the same rule to his father.

The other part of the book that I found most novel and informative was the discussion of Feynman's view of scientific explanation. This view appears in a section with the title “The Explorers and the Tourists.” In Feynman's view, scientists are explorers and philosophers are tourists. The tourists like to find everything tidy; the explorers take Nature as they find her. Feynman did not agree with the view prevalent among philosophers that the purpose of science is to reduce natural phenomena to a few fundamental laws. He believed that all natural phenomena are worth exploring and explaining, whether or not the explanation turns out to be fundamental. Gleick sums up Feynman's scientific credo in one sentence, the clearest statement I have seen of the true spirit of science: “He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know but as the essence of knowing.”