Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman’s Last Journey.

LEIGHTON, Ralph.

$175.00

Item Number: 5463

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991.

First edition of this memoir on Leighton’s friendship with colleague Richard Feynman. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, warmly inscribed by the author opposite the title page, “To Ed With many thanks for the on-the-job English lessons Ralph.” The recipient was a student of Leighton’s. Fine in a fine dust jacket.

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.