[In the following review, Kohn praises Genius as “a formidable work of scientific biography,” but notes that Gleick's “guardedness” inhibits his ability to humanize the portrayal of Richard Feynman.]

After winning his Nobel Prize, Richard Feynman was dogged by the fact that he did not get it for something readily identifiable, like inventing the transistor or discovering penicillin. He was grateful to the reporter who suggested he tell inquirers, “Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn't be worth the Nobel Prize.” It was a line tailor-made for the maverick physicist; demotic, mandarin and abrupt.

In the absence of any neat association with a device or a theory, Feynman gathered renown simply as a genius. His way of thinking and speaking, scornful of protocol, won him an entranced following. But despite the celebrated bongo-playing and the long grey locks of his later years, he was a man neither of the counterculture nor of the people. He voted for Eisenhower in the 1950s and steered clear of political issues in subsequent decades. Although magnificently charismatic, he offered the lay public no glib visions, scientific or mystical.

Feynman did, however, seduce it with a mythology of himself. No scientist ever embraced anecdote so wholeheartedly, nor used it so skilfully. Fundamental to the canon were those concerning the wisdom imparted to him by his father, a struggling small businessman with an incandescent passion for scientific thought. The lesson of one was that you could know the name of a bird in half a dozen languages, but you would know nothing about the bird. A secondary function of this story was as a dig at Feynman's rival, Murray Gell-Mann, a keen bird-watcher.

In another tale, the young Richard asked his father why, when he pulled his toy wagon forward, the ball in it rolled to the back. Nobody knew, Feynman senior replied. Although the phenomenon had been named inertia and the laws governing it determined, nobody really knows why a body tends to resist a change of motion. As a scientist, Richard Feynman retained a sense of radical uncertainty and of the provisional nature of all theory. He never looked forward to a grand theory of everything.

Nor did his own career tie up into a coherent whole. There was quantum electrodynamics; there were his dizzingly brilliant physics lectures at Caltech; there was even an excursion into genetics. And there was Los Alamos, where he was one of the cadre that made the Bomb. There, as James Gleick observes, they did science by the seats of their pants. Pragmatism and working approximations resulted in the Trinity mushroom over New Mexico. In the long run, approximations to safety may conceivably have led to Feynman's two rare cancers, the second of which killed him.

Gleick's narrative [Genius], consistently measured and elegant, is a formidable work of scientific biography. His very guardedness, however, keeps him at a distance from his human subject. Having analysed both the nature of Feynman's self-mythologising and the general mythology of genius—yes, he unceremoniously deconstructs his own title—Gleick seems reluctant to risk turning his subject into a character. Feynman's faults are indicated, most notably in his callous attitude to womanising, and so are his charms, but the synthesis of a personality from these details is far more rudimentary than that of a scientific presence.

It was apt that Feynman's swan-song was Newtonian. As a member of the commission investigating the Challenger disaster, during his final illness, he demonstrated the fatal weakness of the space shuttle's O-rings by dunking a sample of the rubber in iced water. To the last, he reminded the world that it is governed by ordinary physics.

Gleick links Feynman to the theme of his previous book, Chaos, by emphasising Feynman's scepticism about invoking mysterious quantum effects to explain complicated phenomena like the weather or the mind. Feynman realised that tiny ordinary events could have massive consequences. He believed that nature is not weird, just wild.