cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

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Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

I am capable of both thinking it's a cute story about a 2 year old who couldn't possibly be expected to get it, and being mortified that the 2 year old was *me*. ;)

Feynman's memoirs

Worth reading? I do voraciously consume memoirs of a certain kind.

From:

cahn

Well, right! I would be mortified if it were me too, but since it's not, I just think it's cute :)

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is a classic and I'm honestly sort of shocked you haven't read it yet. It's told as a series of vignettes spanning his life up to that point. It's really quite a lot of fun and the vignettes are extremely entertaining, especially the first half or so. I think you would love it actually, he's exactly the kind of character you would vibe with in a book, he's so interested and enthusiastic about the things he loves, and so absolutely unwilling to entertain any kind of crap, and he trolls basically everybody. Even my kids thought his college stories about MIT were super fun. I do remember him being kind of a jerk to women at times, so I should warn you about that. I remember the address "Cargo Cult Science" at the end of the book having a huge effect on me (I was quite young when I read this -- 9? 10?)

What Do You Care What Other People Think? is less zany fun and more serious. Part of the book is more stories, but even those are more serious (I think this is the one where he talks about his first wife's death). The second half or so is where he talks about the Challenger hearings. As a kid I liked the first volume better, because zany stories, but I suspect if I read them over again as a middle-aged adult who has Feelings about Science that the second volume might be more rewarding.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Sold! I will download the Kindle samples and give them a try. Thank you.

I'm honestly sort of shocked you haven't read it yet.

I only started to like memoirs about 5 years ago! Before that, it was a genre I actively avoided.

From:

cahn

Oh, but Surely You're Joking is a classic for tech geeks of a certain age (though you might be a little young for it). It isn't slotted in my head as a "memoir" actually, which I never read back then either.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I probably would have read it back in my "I'm going to be a physicist when I grow up" days if my high school library had had it, but I can only imagine we didn't, because I think I'd only even *heard* of it in my thirties.

One thing to keep in mind is just how isolated a tech geek I was. It was me in a small town, at an unacademic high school, in an unintellectual family. I had to find everything on my own. And shortly after starting college, for reasons with which you are familiar, I developed a physics aversion and avoided all mention of physics (and more or less science, too) for a good decade.

I only got back into science in the early 2010s thanks to picking up a book on genetic algorithms that was on the shelves in the office at my first tech job, reading the first few pages, and realizing I needed to learn how *genetics* worked, and then somewhat later, picking up the popular science book T-Rex and the Crater of Doom, which was a great book that I still reread and recommend to people. At that point, it had been long enough since my signal failure to become a physicist that I could emotionally stand to be reminded of science again.

From:

cahn

Huh! I think this might be a generational thing -- which makes sense since it came out mid-80's. Because when I read it (maybe a couple of years after it came out?) I had no idea he was a famous physicist or anything (and had only a somewhat tenuous grasp on what a physicist was at all) -- it was only in college that he switched in my head from "Feynman, the guy who wrote that great book" to "Feynman, the brilliant physicist."

I actually read it because my piano teacher liked books a lot, and had a copy (and I always read her books while my sister was taking her lesson). (She wasn't particularly into science, though it may have been for her oldest son, who was a few years older than I was and had more geeky interests than she did -- I remember at one point he tried to get me to read Roger Zelazny, which I was really too young for at the time.) And I feel like in my generation I've heard this story from several other people, who also just happened to pick it up because it was a best-seller at the time, and were captivated by it even at a young age because he's so appealing to the geek mindset. But I can see how it would have been much harder to find on one's own or by serendipity a few years later, once the buzz had died down.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Huh! I think this might be a generational thing -- which makes sense since it came out mid-80's.

Maybe! Because I certainly knew who Feynman *was*, but I had never heard of this book! When I was in middle school and high school, the book that would have been easy to pick by osmosis was A Brief History of Time.

I finished it today, and...I liked it. I didn't love it. It was a little too episodic for my tastes, I would have preferred more of a connected narrative. I will check out his other book that you said you might like better these days.