This is a good book.

It has some overlap with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which it likely takes as primary sources of some stories.

However, while Surely goes into a lot of detail of each event, this book paints a more cohesive and global picture of things.

In terms of hard physics/mathematics, this book takes the approach of spending a few paragraphs in some chapters describing in high level terms some of the key ideas, which is a good compromise. It does sometime fall into the sin of to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience, but it does give a lot of names, notably it talks a lot about Lagrangian mechanics. And it goes into more details than Surely in any case.

Where Sylvain Poirier dumps his mathematics and physics brain.

Notably, given the domain name, it is clear that he likes formalization of mathematics-stuff, like Ciro Santilli.

At first glance, looks a bit dry though, not many examples.

If Ciro Santilli ever becomes rich, he's going to solve this with: website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system, promise.

Erniang is way more popular than her ranking in the 108 Stars of Destiny.

This is of course in part because she is one of the only 3 108 Stars of Destiny women. But her story about making human mantou is particularly fun!

She's also quite seductive, which gives directors a good opportunity for a bit of fan service. See e.g. kknews.cc/history/6epp2pp.html for a still from The Water Margin showing some good cleavage for example.

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