In the heyday of the physicist Richard P. Feynman, which ensued after his death in 1988, a publishing entrepreneur might have been tempted to start a book club of works by and about him. Offered as main selections would be Feynman’s autobiographical rambles (as told to Ralph Leighton), “ ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ ” and “ ‘What Do You Care What Other People Think?’ ” For alternate selections, readers could choose from his more serious works, like “QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter” — a spirited account of the counterintuitive behavior of the quantum world — and the legendary “Feynman Lectures on Physics.” Whatever the man said had swagger. For those who would rather listen, there are recordings of the lectures and of Feynman playing his bongos.

He was an irresistible subject for biographers and, as he called himself in two of his subtitles, a curious character indeed. The best biography, James Gleick’s “Gen­ius,” captured the ebullience — sometimes winning, sometimes exasperating — and gave lucid explanations of some hard physics. Those seeking a more mathematical treatment could turn to Jagdish Mehra’s thick book “The Beat of a Different Drum,” while for a lighter touch there was Christopher Sykes’s “No Ordinary Gen­ius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman.”

It is hard to imagine that the world needs another Feynman biography, but here it is. In “Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science,” Lawrence M. Krauss, director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, makes his own way through the subject and emerges with an enlightening addition to the field. Krauss — like Feynman a physicist as well as an author — has written seven books, including “The Physics of Star Trek.” Though he couldn’t resist recycling some well-worn Feynman anecdotes (and providing a couple of his own), he concentrates on Feynman the thinker, and on the contributions that merited his fame.

It is not something easily summarized. Einstein discovered relativity. Murray Gell-Mann discovered the quark. And Feynman? Well, there was that thing he did on TV with the O-ring and the ice water, showing why the Challenger had disintegrated. But to physicists he is famous for something more obscure: cleaning up the mathematical mess known as quantum electrodynamics — an ambitious attempt to explain light and matter using two great theories, quantum mechanics and special relativity.