For example (p. 277) "Bethe worried that Feynman was growing restless after four years at Cornell. There were entanglements with women: Feynman pursued them and then dropped them, or tried to, with increasingly public frustration -- so it seemed even to undergraduates, who knew him as the least professorial of professors."
If you get to p. 290, there's a quite astonishing section on Feynman's effort to work out the rules of flirting in a bar. You can still admire his science after reading the book. You'll be both charmed and troubled by his over-sized personality. But, hey, he was a complicated guy.
I don't know anything about the "paid abortion" thing.
It's tricky stuff... Feynman was (is?) a hero of mine, and I struggle to put this stuff in context.
Heros have feet of clay. The correct move is to adjust your concept of "hero" to include this.
The alternative, that you will only declare someone a "hero" if they are perfect in every way yields a definition of "hero" with 0 instances, which is a useless definition.
If Feynmann was abusive to his wife to some degree, well, plenty of people are abusive to their wifes without also creating physics breakthroughs. It's OK to honor his ability to do that without having to think of him as perfect.
The context is that there was no such thing as no-fault divorce in the United States until 1969, and as a result, it was not uncommon for people to invent phony stories about abuse and submit false testimony to the court.
The 'his calculus or his drum playing' part is kind of a giveaway.
