I bought this to read and also to kickstart illinicheme's ring.

Thanks to the extreme generosity of luv2sewtjr, The Meaning of It All bookring is back in operation! You can see the journal entries for the original copy of the book here.

The list of participants is:
FutureCat (New Zealand)
lightwavz (Michigan) <-- on its way to
arugh48187 (Minnesota)
kayters (Georgia)
MaryZee (Maryland)
Kernow8 (UK)
veritas9 (Australia)

Thank you again luv2sewtjr!

Well, what can I say? I actually struggled to get through this book. I had very high expectations for this book. I loved Feynman's other 2 books and I also enjoyed Gleick's biography of him, Genius. I think the lecture style was a little off-putting. It was difficult for me to follow and a little disorganized at times. I probably would have liked it better if I could listen to it.

The topics themselves are thought-provoking, especially the discussions of religion and government.

Once I hear from veritas9, I'll be moving this book along.

I'm sending this off to FutureCat since I haven't heard from veritas9. If veritas9 is still interested, we'll just flip-flop the reading order. :)

Arrived safely in New Zealand today. I've got a couple a bookring books to read ahead of this one (as usual, they've all arrived at once), but MrPloppy saw me open the parcel and said "ooh, ooh, can I read it too?", so I'll detour the ring slightly and give it to him to read while I'm reading the other books.

Thanks, illinicheme, and luv2sewtjr!

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Lovely wee book by one of my heroes, the great physicist, bongo drum player and striptease joint attender, Richard Feynman. In these three "lectures" he talks about science, morality, religion and the importance of uncertainty amongst other things. Easy to read, you can hear his voice throughout the unpretentious prose and almost feel his enthusiasm and compassion for that most scientific and unscientific species of the animal kingdom, the human being.

I'd never read anything of Feynman's before, or heard him speak; all I really knew about him was that he was a scientist and one of MrPloppy's heroes - which was a good enough reason to want to join this bookring (it might surprise him to learn it, but I *do* generally respect his taste in heroes... well, maybe with the exception of William Burroughs and Mark E Smith...) Anyway, the gamble paid off, because I really enjoyed this book. There's always a danger with science writing from a few decades ago that it will seem too dated now, but most of what Feynman says in this book is equally relevant today. In fact, there's a bit near the end that, while it actually refers to a charity he visited, seemed to me to have a certain appropriateness to the situation in the USA at the moment:

It starts out all right, with the good, and love, and Christ, and so on, and it builds itself up until it's afraid of an enemy. And then it forgets its original idea. It turns itself inside out and becomes absolutely contrary to the beginning.

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Sorry about the terrible delay with sending this on - a combination of lightwavz forgetting they hadn't given me their address, and me forgetting to actually take the parcel to the post office!

Anyway, the book is now (finally) on its way to America...

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