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Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Series)

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Luis Alvarez was likely the best American experimental physicist of the 20th century who lived a full and interesting life from the bitter winters of Wisconsin to San Francisco Bay where he began.
He invented radar for instrument flight landing, discovered new elements, invented new accelerators, invented clever optical devices, built the big bubble chambers of particle physics, x-rayed the pyramid at Giza with cosmic rays, used elementary physics to conclusively solve all the unknowns of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in 1963, looked in Moon rocks for magnetic monopoles, and hypothesized the cause of the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
He was an observer on the plane that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Japan, kept a few Moon rocks on the mantle in his living room where he hosted weekly gatherings of students and physicists, and "did physics" until he died of esophogeal cancer.
This book is a joy for a physicist to read, but anyone who is curious about what physicists really do and how they approach problems both large and small, this book is a treasure.