And he was right. Feynman in person was electrifying, no matter what he spoke about. He could say more with body language alone than most people can extract from the Oxford English Dictionary. But on paper, dealing with matters far from his comfort zone, Feynman is quite another matter. The book is badly dated and atrociously edited.
Many pages make the reader squirm with embarrassment.
Sometimes he's just a little off the point. He trashes those English professors not for the relentless banality of most literary criticism but for not producing a rational scheme of spelling. At other times it's just not the right stuff. Feynman doing battle with the earnest ladies of the Altadena Americanism Center has some of the same spirit as the famous stories he liked to tell about himself, but it's neither racy nor funny, just quaint and somewhat silly. And there are many references to names that had meaning in 1963 but not anymore.