No Ordinary Genius. The Illustrated Richard Feynman, Christopher Sykes (ISBN 978-039331393-2, W. W. Norton)

I came across a reference to this book in another book I read about Feynman and it ended up on my list. I bought it last year and then decided end of 2022 to start reading it while I was also reading The Discoverers to add a bit of light reading in the mix. Christopher Sykes is a documentary film maker and he made 2 documentary films about Feynman. For these documentaries he interviewed Feynman, his family and friends and colleagues. The book has the structure of a biography and is similar to Genius by James Gleick but content wise it is still different. As the title suggests it has many pictures and these are side by side with the text and part of the chapters. The text itself consists of edited conversations Sykes had with various people. In each chapter there are multiple paragraphs, one per conversation, always with the person quoted indicated alongside the paragraph at the beginning. That makes the text a bit fragmented but Sykes has done a good job to bring unity into it. Due to the concept the book lacks the overall context and story of a real biography but it forms a nice addition to Genius from Gleick, adding a lot of first hand material by Feynman himself. It also gives a more complete and first hand picture of Feynman as a human being and as a scientist through all the written down conversations from the people in the book that knew and lived or worked with Feynman. If you want to read only one book about or by Feynman then this is not the first choice but if you already read something and want to know more about what kind of person Feynman was then this can be a good addition. It is also relatively short with around 250 not very densely printed pages with lots of pictures in between so you will fly through it. And because it is basically a collection of interview fragments you can read it almost a page at a time whenever you feel like it without losing track.