Richard Feynman
Sta scherzando, Mr. Feynman!

So, Feynman was a freaking genius! My statement might seem obvious given that he won a Nobel Prize in Physics, but he was truly brilliant!
What did he win the Nobel for? I'll tell you; for QED (quantum electrodynamics), the pinnacle of quantum mechanics: the theory that works! The pride of 20th-century physicists. The standard model and QCD (the theory of particle physics) can easily bow down to QED! (By the way, a new experiment at Gran Sasso, with greater precision than OPERA, seems to have detected that these beloved neutrinos do not exceed the speed of light)

Feynman might not have been the abstract genius like Dirac or Gödel (I won't say Einstein because his tongue is now more overrated than someone who wants to be a punk rocker in London), but he was definitely one of those minds that effortlessly grasp the big picture, understanding the core of problems.
Feynman was very human, a cool guy, someone who loved to laugh and felt comfortable among people: to those who wish to study physics, I would recommend him as a model to follow.
Feynman loved spending long periods in Las Vegas (and not for gambling), he was someone who engaged in heated physics discussions with the painter he met at the bar, someone who for fun translated Mayan hieroglyphics and found that the official translation was wrong.
Feynman was someone who knew how to explain physics, who took problems to heart, someone who participated in the Manhattan Project and then was discharged from military service for mental problems.
Feynman played the bongos, won music competitions in Brazil, and hated inflated egos.

In short, the book in question is full of entertaining anecdotes about his life (you'll laugh heartily, believe me) but the reason it's worth reading is that it gives you an idea of what "thinking intelligently" truly means. Exemplary is Feynman's discussion about the so-called "cargo cult": without going into detail about what it is (read the book!!), I can affirm that this is the crux of the entire matter.
I can affirm without fear of being contradicted (I know, I'm arrogant) that the best way man has found to organize his thoughts is the scientific method (how many times has a theory predicted events we would never have dreamed of imagining and that were later observed!): well, our favorite scientist, however, doesn't take all this science stuff too seriously. In short, he loves it, of course, he respects it, but repeatedly teaches us to see things for what they really are, to understand what the "theory" refers to, to come back down to Earth. He urges us to a knowledge different from the academic one, which unfortunately very often consists in nothing more than memorizing a bunch of data and notions but does not teach us to connect them... to see them from above.

Feynman's discussions with rabbis and "scholars" are applause-worthy: nothing against these categories, of course, but sometimes the human race should learn to stop overthinking. Culture is utilitarian, art should be used (to grow, of course), and so should knowledge in general. Enough with the adulation of the wise, the adulation of concepts, the adulation of words. Those who stop at this, I think, are just scratching the surface: good grief, Dante can't possibly be just the chained rhymes of his tercets, right?

I could have organized my thoughts more scientifically perhaps, but writing spontaneously more vividly conveys the emotional drive that triggers knowing this man. A mind so frighteningly genius and a man so immensely human can be moving (another good subject of this kind, with a mind even more frighteningly brilliant than Feynman, is John von Neumann).

And in the end, whether he was a genius or not doesn't matter to anyone anymore.