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Relying in part on sources never before made available to the public, Gleick explains with crystal clarity the paradoxes of quantum physics -- a subject that Feynman himself said nobody understands -- just as he laid bare the arcana of higher mathematics in his 1987 best seller, Chaos. Gleick also uncovers some of the forces that created a man who could devotedly nurse his first wife as she lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium a few miles from the wartime Manhattan Project, where he worked, yet later in life could make a sport out of picking women up in bars; a man who despised hero worship yet wrote books in which he was the hero; a man who rarely taught classes or took on doctoral students but is regarded as one of physics' great teachers. If some questions remain about exactly what made Feynman Feynman, and not just a garden-variety genius, that is no fault of Gleick's. A magician who reveals all his secrets, even from beyond the grave, is a magician no longer.