“SURELY YOU’RE JOKING, MR. FEYNMAN!” Adventures of a Curious Character <i> by Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton; edited by : Edward Hutchings (Bantam Books: $8.95)</i>

When Richard P. Feynman, the late, world-renowned physicist with a passion for puzzle-solving and for making mischief, received the call at 4 in the morning telling him that he had won the 1965 Nobel Prize for physics, his reaction was to say, “Yeah, but I’m sleeping !” By the fifth or sixth call he told the reporter from Time magazine, “I don’t know how to get out of this thing. Maybe I won’t accept the prize.” But the combustible curmudgeon eventually relented.

In “Surely You’re Joking,” Feynman tells stories of his childhood in Far Rockaway, of his studies at MIT and Princeton, of his experience on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, of his work as professor at Cornell and Caltech and of his research in theoretical physics.

Feynman’s indefatigable enthusiasm for solving puzzles, whether deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics, cracking high-security safes in Los Alamos or solving the mystery of liquid helium is consistently and utterly infectious.