I only know Mr. Feynman from using his physics text as a freshman in college in the 1960's.  Reading this autobiography gives me what I think is an accurate description of the whole person.  He was a genius in the physics, but he also had a wide range of other talents.  The book is filled with tales of learning to draw,  playing  the drums, learning Portugeuse, cracking safes --- and always his love of beautiful women.<br> Don't expect any great writing.  I was reading some essays by Joan Didion at the same time, so his pedestrian prose was very evident.  Nevertheless, the book was one of the most interesting ones I have read in quite a while.  There were many "chapters" of just one or two pages which included some random anecdote that made you laugh or made you think.<br> The book is somewhat chronological, but it often skips randomly from here to there.  In one chapter he talks about a woman he met in a bar using terms such  whores and bitch.  A chapter later he is discussing numerical approximations of logarithms.  I saw  the excellent video: "Richard Feynman - No Ordinary Genius"  where he was trying to explain the way he thinks when he solves problems.  He tried his best, but ended up saying the process just couldn't be described in words.<br>  The sections on the Manhattan Project were especially interesting, giving a glimpse at the other great minds making the  first atomic bomb.  And then there was the concern for security, which was negated by Feynman's ability to retrieve documents from any safe at Los Alamos or Oak Ridge.<br>  Throughout the book I got the impression that he was trying very hard  to show himself as a well rounded guy.  He did not want to be thought of as living in an ivory tower.  Hence we get the stories of drawing nudes in a topless bar near CalTech,  playing the tambourine at the Carnaval in Rio and talking to Nick the Greek in Vegas.  But in a later chapter he would declare that all other educational disciplines paled in comparison to physics.<br>  After reading the book I would say that Mr. Feynman definitey passes my test of  "Would I have liked to sit next to this person on an airplane for a few hours?