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Nope, not wasting any more time on this clown. I read up through his chapter on how to neg a woman in order to trick her into sleeping with you and thought "Yep, I am done. Gave this the good ol' college try but the bad outweighs the good here." Who knew Feynman, as well as being a brilliant Nobel Prize winning physicist was also the patron saint of the PUA(Pick up artist) community?

I am honestly shocked at the number of rave reviews this collection of personal anecdotes has. I assume people are blinded by Feynman's intellect - which was staggering - and his joyful attitude towards learning for learning's sake. Perhaps if I had read a biography of Feynman, written by someone else, I wouldn't have had such a negative reaction to him?

It seemed obvious to me, both as a former SPED teacher and as the parent of someone on the autistic spectrum, that Feynman had undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome. He often mentions his inability to understand social cues and to interact successfully with others. His story of using other people's nervous laughter as a clue that his behavior was incorrect was telling. He couldn't tell by unspoken body language or facial expressions or tone of voice - he needed actual tittering laughter to signal that he needed to adjust his behavior. Feynman used his prodigious intellect to help him work around his deficits in social behavior but often it wasn't enough.

The first painful story was that of the waitress and the tip. Oh wow. Even when telling the story, years later, he has no idea how egregious his behavior was. He pulled the juvenile trick of leaving the tip as coins with a full glass of water on top. Two glasses with the coins split between them. Just what a busy server in a restaurant wants to deal with. To add insult to injury, this was a restaurant he went to daily & a waitress that often served him. This is how he repays her for doing a good job. His motivation for being a jerk? He wanted to see if she would be able to figure out how to get her tip without making a big mess, though how he would know this is unclear, since he wasn't there when she attempted it. He returns the next day to find everyone angry at him & the waitress refusing to interact with him anymore. She didn't have time for his intellectual query - since, you know, she had an actual job she needed to be doing - and the water spilled everywhere & that made extra work for her, cleaning his mess up, and then later she slipped & hurt herself on the still damp floor. Feynman has no clue that he has done anything wrong & can't figure out why people are upset. Then - get this - HE DOES IT AGAIN WITH THE NEW WAITRESS SERVING HIM. Hardy har har, ain't he a hoot?

He tells many stories like this, where he is a complete asshole to people. He can't understand why people don't trust him and think he is a liar. One thing he enjoyed doing was pretending to be drunk when he wasn't - ugh, insert big eye roll here - because, I don't know honestly. Because he has no understanding of human emotions and common reactions?

I stopped reading after the anecdote about how he is a nice guy but woman still won't have sex with him - can't they see how nice he is, damn it?! - so he meets a guy who teaches him the trick is to treat women like whores and bitches.

" I adopted the attitude that those girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and that all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing. I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches and so on. I learned it till it was automatic."

A good reminder that just because someone is an intellectual genius or has an amazing artistic talent or incredible physical prowess doesn't make them a decent or even likable person. People tend to ascribe positive characteristics to successful people whether they are truly worthy of them or not. Feynman is a good example of this.