The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck

For whatever reason, I was never required to read this book in high school, so I read it now for the first time as an adult. It's really a masterful work, very emotionally powerful and heartbreaking. The grotesque plight of the disenfranchised Oklahoma tenant farmers is told through the eyes of the Joad family. The story recounts their struggles as they are forced to leave their land and seek work in California, where they experience the cruelty of poverty and the futility of hard work and hope in the face of an oppressive system.  I am not surprised the book was so controversial in its day, the politics are very progressive and pro-labor. The book can be graphically disturbing but it is  an important story that remains very relevant today.

Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!

A present from Will, I greatly enjoyed this book of Feynman's reminiscences!  I was familiar with some of the tales, which I enjoyed re-reading, and I was delighted to read many new accounts of Feynman's insatiable curiosity and lively sense of fun.  As a child during the Depression, he bought many broken radios and repaired or recombined them - and then was hired by relatives and, eventually, stores, to repair their radios and other appliances.

Sometimes his ingenious inventions created gigantic and very humorous consequences, as when he devised a rapid-fire string bean slicer and, enthusiastically demonstrating it for the head chef, cut his finger, releasing blood into an entire bowl of beans, dooming his invention! His adventures in drumming, safecracking, deciphering Mayan codices, art, and frequenting topless bars are all absorbing and very entertaining.

The book ends with a transcription of his commencement speech to graduating Caltech students, titled Cargo Cult Science.  I have read this before and again found it interesting; he describes the difference between real science and "phony" science - but his concluding advice was dishearteningly relevant to much of today's academic research:

So I have just one wish for you - the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity.  May you have that freedom.

This is really a very enjoyable read!