SOURCE: “Doubt as the Essence of Knowing: The Genius of Richard Feynman,” in Physics Today, Vol. 45, No. 11, November, 1992, p. 87.

In the following review, Dyson offers a positive assessment of Genius.

Six years ago Richard Rhodes published his historical study, The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Like most of my friends, I thought the last thing the world needed was another fat book about the atomic bomb. But it turned out that Rhodes had done his homework and gone back to primary sources; he discovered a wealth of new facts that the earlier books had missed. I was forced to reverse my initial judgment. After all, the world did need a comprehensive and reliable history of the atomic bomb, and Rhodes had supplied it.

My initial reaction to James Gleick's new book [Genius] was the same. After three books by Ralph Leighton and all the other published reminiscences of...