Genius

From a childhood in Far Rockaway, Queens, through MIT, Princeton, Los Alamos and Cornell to Caltech, James Gleick's biography traces the life and work of physicist Richard Feynman. To set that work in context, Gleick gives a brief history of quantum mechanics, from Max Planck and Niels Bohr to Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Paul Dirac. He also covers figures around Feynman, including his thesis adviser John Archibald Wheeler, Freeman Dyson, his rival Julian Schwinger and his sister Joan, an astrophysicist, and describes his marriage to Arline Greenbaum, who had tuberculosis. Gleick tried not to lean too heavily on Feynman's story collections, which he judged mostly accurate but strongly filtered. It appeared in 1992 and was nominated for a National Book Award.

Naval Ravikant mentioned in a podcast interview that he was rereading it, alongside Feynman's letters in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations.