SOURCE: “Casanova of the Mind,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 1, 1992, pp. 1, 8.

In the following review, Bass offers a positive assessment of Genius.

Save for the beatified Einstein, few physicists have become famous. Robert Oppenheimer or Werner Heisenberg might be exceptions. But how many other physicists can we pick out of the serried ranks?

Maybe one other—Richard Feynman, who won the requisite Nobel Prize and taught for many years at Cal Tech before becoming famous, first as a popular author and then as a member of the panel examining the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986.

Feynman was famous, but perhaps for the wrong reasons, as James Gleick asserts in his new biography of the scientist. Before his death of cancer in 1988, Feynman's fame had become the mask of a carefully cultivated persona, argues Gleick, a persona that actually obscured the man's real accomplishments.

It is Gleick's...