One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” is Feynman’s last literary legacy, prepared with his friend and fellow drummer, Ralph Leighton.

Among the book’s many tales—some funny, others intensely moving—we meet Feynman’s first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love’s irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster’s cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen.

Richard Phillips Feynman (1918-1988) was born in Far Rockaway, New York. He earned a B.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939 and a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, he assisted with the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He then taught at Cornell University and California Institute of Technology where he contributed to the theories of superfluidity and quarks. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other scientists for work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics.