I once had a friend that I was tutoring in physics explain to me that this was her intro physics "textbook". Amazingly, though I was studying physics, I hadn't really been introduced to Richard Feynman in any real way. That Saturday, I sat down with a cup of coffee in my small rooming house kitchen and started reading this book. Feynman is a magician of explanation. On every page I read, Feynman took some concept that I was familiar with and tugged it apart, then with a sly turn deftly snapped it back together in a new form. The explanation that he produced this way was simpler, better, and it was as if he'd dropped that concept to its ground state. A puff of needless complication floats away and he hands you back a pearl of an idea. That's what reading this is like.