Once again, the festive season is upon us, and with it comes my annual suggestions for books on science and medicine.

Although recent statistics suggest that book readers are becoming an endangered species, I am heartened by the number of emails telling me how much you have enjoyed a certain pick (last year’s clear favourite was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot), or giving me your own particular insight into a book I have discussed.

With that in mind, this year I wish to recommend not one, but two, books about Dr. Richard P. Feynman, one of the 20th century’s greatest physicists and bona fide characters. (You may best remember him in conjunction with the 1986 probe of the Challenger space shuttle disaster; in a short, riveting, scientific demonstration, Feynman used a clamp, a rubber ring and a glass of ice water to explain why he believed that freezing weather at the time of the shuttle’s launch caused the booster rocket’s normally pliable “O” ring insulators to stiffen and deform, allowing fuel to leak out, catch fire and blow up the space craft as it “throttled up”).

The first, a 1985 New York Times bestseller biography, still in print, or available for download, is entitled, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (Adventures of a Curious Character). Written by Ralph Leighton, a close friend who interviewed Feynman over a seven-year period, this is the often laugh-out-loud story (actually a series of stories) about the brilliant, but irreverent, physicist and university professor whose hobbies included playing the bongo drums, painting nudes and safe-cracking!

Despite his many eccentricities, Feynman, who had worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atom bomb, was a brilliant scientist, whose lectures at Caltech were so popular that they were ultimately compiled into a large volume (“The Feynman Lectures in Physics”), widely regarded as “the bible” by all serious students of that discipline.

An outside-the-box thinker, he invented his own mathematics and converted complex equations governing the behavior of subatomic particles into mind-friendly drawings, now known as Feynman diagrams, that were vital for an understanding of quantum electrodynamics. For his far-reaching contributions, Feynman would share the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics, an honour that he was loathe to accept.

Here is his account of being awakened by an early-morning call from Sweden to tell him that he had been selected for the scientific world’s most prestigious award:

‘Professor Feynman?’             
‘Hey! Why are you bothering me at this time in the morning?’
‘I thought you’d like to know that you’ve won the Nobel Prize.’  
‘Yeah, but I’m sleeping! It would have been better if you had called me in the morning.’ --- and I hung up.

When contacted a few hours later by “a guy from Time magazine”, Feynman told the reporter, “Listen, I’ve got a problem, so I want this off the record. I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Is there some way not to accept the prize?”

He was deadly serious. It all stemmed from his antipathy towards having to receive his award from the King of Sweden. “…You see, I had been brought up by my father against royalty and pomp (he was in the uniforms business, so he knew the difference between a man with a uniform on, and with the uniform off -- it’s the same man),” he explained.

After being assured by friends and colleagues that, although he would need to wear a tuxedo, the ceremony’s formality had been significantly loosened over the years, Feynman finally decided to make the trip to Stockholm, shake the King’s hand and receive his medal. His Nobel lecture was regarded as a tour de force by the few in the audience who could understand it.

In praising this book, Time magazine stated, “A chain reaction is not a bad analogy for Feynman’s life. From a critical mass of gray matter it goes off in all directions, producing both heat and light.”

The Associated Press agreed, saying, “If you are one of those people who think there can’t be much fun in physics—or physicists--meet Mr. Feynman….One of the funniest fellows who ever juggled a bunch of atoms.”

I heartily agree and, hopefully, so will you.

The second book, entitled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations (From the Beaten Track): The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, is a compilation of 40 years of his private correspondence, lovingly edited by his daughter, Michelle. To say that a lot of territory is covered in its 467 pages is an understatement, but it is a fabulous must-read for anyone interested in learning more about what made Feynman tick.

Published in 2005, 17 years after her father’s premature death, at age 69, from an abdominal sarcoma, the book reveals a man whose words are always entertaining and, in their candour, often breath-taking. An example is this 1968 letter to the president of Princeton University, his alma mater:

“Dear Sir, I am sorry, but I do not wish to accept the honorary degree you have offered me. I already have one degree, honestly earned, from Princeton. At the commencement when I received it, I remember watching the honorary degrees being conferred and feeling that an ‘honorary’ degree was a debasement of the idea of a degree that confirms that certain work has been accomplished.”

Feynman also had a running correspondence with the National Academy of Sciences after he suddenly insisted on resigning and they couldn’t understand why. When, in 1970,   one of the Acadamy’s illustrious members, Johns Hopkins mathematician, Dr. Francis Murnaghan, wrote to express his angst, Feynman replied:

“My resignation from the Academy was for purely personal reasons and was not meant to imply any criticism of the Academy, nor to damage it in any way. It is just the result of a peculiar quirk in my personality which arises in my reaction to ‘honors’. I am sorry to hear that such a minor thing caused you any worry.”

Then there is this 1978 letter to Nobel laureate, Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA:

“Dear Francis, I regret having to do this, but I am returning this paper to you unread. My schedule is such lately that I must refuse to get bogged down reading someone else’s theory; it may turn out to be wonderful and there I’d be with something else to think about.”

Lest you think he was always a curmudgeon, there was also a loving and tender side to Feynman, exemplified by this letter to his first wife, Arline (whom he affectionately called “Putzie”), as she lay in a sanatorium bed in March, 1945, dying of tuberculosis:

“…I am writing this Tuesday Morning. I love you Tuesday Morning. But that is just a symptom of a far more extensive ailment. I love you always. You are a nice wife. I like to come to visit you --- and I wish it were Sat[urday] already---which it nearly is. How did you make out this week? I love you, little Putzie. So long. RPF”

A loyal son, he also faithfully kept in touch with his “mom”, Lucille, and his “pop”, Melville, after he left home to pursue his studies and career. Indeed, it was his father who, although not a scholar, was innately wise, using the Encyclopedia Britannica and nature walks to inculcate a love of knowledge in young Richard.

Writing in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson, himself a physicist, summed things up this way: “This collection of letters shows us for the first time the son caring for his father and mother, the father caring for his wife and children, the teacher caring for his students, the writer replying to   people throughout the world who wrote to him about their problems and received his full and undivided attention.”

And this from the Los Angeles Times Book Review: “With [this] publication….we get Feynman direct—from his mind to the stationery and into the envelope….Feynman often insisted that he couldn’t write. Now we know better. It was another of his jokes.”

Richard Feynman’s death in 1988 was widely lamented. In a long tribute in The New York Times, James Gleick wrote:

“Physicists like Einstein had to struggle to reconcile their ordinary intuitions with the evidence of their equations. Dr. Feynman happily gave up the struggle. He and the physicists of his generation made peace with a way of describing nature that only explained how, not why.

“Much of what he accomplished he would admit to not understanding. ‘I can live with doubt and uncertainty,’ he once said. ‘I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

‘I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, so far as I can tell,’ he added. ‘It doesn't frighten me.’”

So there we are. Two highly recommended books about a brilliant and offbeat scientist whose reputation has continued to grow by leaps and bounds long after his death. If you don’t believe me, look at the over one million hits on The Feynman Lectures website.

And with that, I wish all of you a peaceful holiday season spent with family and friends, and good health in 2012.