Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey

by Ralph Leighton

Release Date: 15 May, 2000

Edition: Paperback

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funny, informative, and even a little inspiring

"Tuva or Bust!" is the story of three friends in the 1980s, who were determined to travel to Tuva, a little known land in Central Asia, which at that time was part of the Soviet Union. Their original motivation? As Richard Feynman says in the first chapter, "A place that's spelled K-Y-Z-Y-L (Tuva's capitol) has just got to be interesting!"

The book chronicles the adventures and misadventures of Ralph Leighton, one of Feynman's longtime friends. Though the book is subtitled "Richard Feynman's Last Journey," it's really Leighton's story; Feynman is more of an inspiration and a supporting character. Over several years, Leighton and his friends wrote letters, researched articles, read books, and became more and more fascinated by Tuva, a tiny country in the middle of nowhere. They learned, among other things, that Tuvans practice three different types of steppe herding lifestyles, within a hundred miles of each other, and that Tuva is the home of throat-singing, a musical technique in which a single person produces two notes at the same time.

Leighton's narration is chatty, reminiscent of Feynman's autobiographical works; one suspects Leighton learned to tell anecdotes from his friend. However, Leighton isn't as inherently fascinating a narrator as Feynman. Also, Feynman's persistent cancer, which kept him from participating in several preliminary trips, and finally killed him shortly before Leighton received permission for a group of Americans to travel to Tuva itself, casts a pall over the book.

Still, this is a fascinating story -- a great example of what people can do if they really care about a cause, and don't realize precisely how little chance they have of succeeding. It is also informative, if somewhat superficial in its description of Tuvan culture; I now want to know more about Central Asian peoples, and Tuvans in particular. But while the chapter "Reflections 2000," included in the new paperback version of "Tuva or Bust!" is interesting, I really don't think it was fair of Leighton to mention a new idea for a Tuvan monument to Feynman, and refuse to give any details. Now I want another reprint!

Fun read

I just had a few miscellaneous comments on this book.

Although this book isn't so much about Feynman's last trip as about the trials and tribulations he and his longtime friend Leighton experienced trying to get there, this was still an enjoyable book. Feynman himself passed away from cancer shortly before they got permission to actually travel to Tuva, a remote region of Mongolia near the Altai mountains, a 10,000-foot-high mountain range that separates eastern Mongolia from western China. But because of his illness, Feynman himself isn't so much the protagonist in this story so much as the inspiration, as Leighton discusses the research and preparations that led up to the final journey. But there is still enough of the inimitable Feynman, the "curious character" as he calls himself, in the narrative for it to be enjoyable to long-time Feynman fans. The pictures of Feynman in an elaborate Tahitian headress playing the drums at a concert and dressed up like a Tibetan lama with hat and prayer wheel are truly comical and show the great physicist certainly had a sense of humour about himself too--even as he was dying from cancer.

I came to the book partly because I already knew something about Tuvan throat singing and had read a little bit about Ural-Altaic linguistics, and so knew something about the Mongolian languages, and a little about the life-style of the herders in the area. It turns out the Altaic language group has had some capable linguists studying the family over the last 30 years, and a lot more is known now than in the past. I've found at least one site with much good information on Mongolian and Altaic languages on the web in the last year.

But all that was by way of saying, stangely enough, that I actually knew something about this remote and obscure area of the world before reading this book, and so was interested to see what sort of adventures Feynman and his friend might have there. Although Feynman himself never made it there, I learned much about the country I hadn't known before, and having Feynman's unique and funny perspective on it made it all the more enjoyable.