Roughly half of these 21 short, colloquial essays deal with Feynman's firsthand investigaton
of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster. He casts himself in the role of intrepid detective,
and the first-person singular pronoun keeps intruding on the worthwhile things he has to say
about flight safety and lack of communication within NASA. An appendix offers his chilling
technical observations on the shuttle's reliability or lack of it. The remaining pieces are
mostly a blur of international conferences, purveying slight anecdotes. But two essays touch
genuine depths of feeling: his tribute to his father, who taught him to cultivate a sense of
wonder, and his account of his love affair with his first wife (who died). In this posthumous
miscellany, theoretical physicist Feynman displays only sporadically the adventurousness that
captivated readers of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.

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