Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey

Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey
by Ralph Leighton

Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey
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Book Summary Information

Author: Ralph Leighton
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2000-05-15
ISBN: 0393320693
Number of pages: 260
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
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Book Reviews of Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey

Book Review: This book is a fraud
Summary: 1 Stars

I am a confirmed Feynman fan and even met him a couple of times. I was eager to learn more about him and his travels. The subtitle promised details of his "last journey", which, it turns out, he never made. Instead, I was bored with insipid details of the author's attempts to arrange a trip to the USSR and other assorted junk. It did not even spend much time on Tuva itself, but on unrelated trivia. It was apparent that the author was immensely more interested in the trip than Feynman, and that even he wasn't interested enough to stay at it to fruition. The author trades on the Feynman name to shamelessly promote the book and con the reader into plodding through endless drivel. Don't bother.

Summary of Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey

As a stamp-collecting boy always fascinated by remote places, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was particularly taken by the diamond-shaped stamps from a place called Tannu Tuva deep within Outer Mongolia. He hoped, someday, to travel there. In 1977, Feynman and his sidekick--fellow drummer and geography enthusiast Ralph Leighton--set out to make arrangements to visit Tuva, doing noble and hilarious battle with Soviet red tape, befriending quite a few Tuvans, and discovering the wonders of Tuvan throat-singing. Their Byzantine attempts to reach Tannu Tuva would span a decade, interrupted by Feynman's appointment to the committee investigating the Challenger disaster, and his tragic struggle with the cancer that finally killed him. Tuva or Bust! chronicles the deepening friendship of two zany, brilliant strategists whose love of the absurd will delight and instruct. It is Richard Feynman's last, best adventure.
Richard Feynman, brilliant physicist and inspirational teacher, wasn't much for coats and ties. He lived a life that the adjective "bohemian" doesn't begin to cover, scripting percussion scores for avant-garde ballet troupes, musing over life's imponderables, and delighting and annoying his many friends with odd-duck questions--all the while teaching generations of students at CalTech.

Always adventurous, Feynman was also a careful planner, recounts his friend and fellow drummer Ralph Leighton in this affectionate memoir. When a chance remark happened to dislodge a long-dormant memory of a faraway Siberian land called Tannu-Tuva, Feynman and Leighton set about scheming to get there--a program that included learning the little-described Tuvan language, picking up the rudiments of throat singing, and reading the scattered, hard-to-find literature concerning a place that, in Feynman's fond view, was as close to paradise as the earth contained. It also involved corresponding with scholars in what was still the Soviet Union and wrangling with bureaucrats to secure the necessary papers--all for the sake of seeing a country that had to be interesting, Feynman insisted, just because its capital, Kyzyl, had such an odd spelling.

These picaresque armchair adventures make up the bulk of Tuva or Bust, an unconventional mix of travelogue and scientific biography that's a pleasure to read at every turn. The book yields a memorable picture of Richard Feynman--who did not live to see Tuva, but whose memory is honored there today, thanks to Leighton's refusal to abandon their shared dream. --Gregory McNamee

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