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Father of the Atomic Bomb: Robert OppenheimerLENGDUNG TUNGCHAMMA

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American Prometheus: The Inspiration for the Major Motion Picture OPPENHEIMER Paperback – May 1, 2006

by Kai Bird (Author), Martin J. Sherwin (Author)

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THE INSPIRATION FOR THE ACADEMY AWARD®-WINNING MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPPENHEIMER • "A riveting account of one of history’s most essential and paradoxical figures.”—Christopher Nolan

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The definitive biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, a brilliant physicist who led the effort to build the atomic bomb for his country in a time of war, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of scientific progress.

In this magisterial, acclaimed biography twenty-five years in the making, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin capture Oppenheimer’s life and times, from his early career to his central role in the Cold War. This is biography and history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative.

“A masterful account of Oppenheimer’s rise and fall, set in the context of the turbulent decades of America’s own transformation. It is a tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times

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From the Publisher

the inspiration for the major motion picture oppenheimer

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The definitive biography.... Oppenheimer’s life doesn’t influence us. It haunts us.” —Newsweek

“A masterful account of Oppenheimer’s rise and fall, set in the context of the turbulent decades of America’s own transformation. It is a tour de force.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A work of voluminous scholarship and lucid insight, unifying its multifaceted portrait with a keen grasp of Oppenheimer’s essential nature.... It succeeds in deeply fathoming his most damaging, self-contradictory behavior.” —The New York Times

“There have been numerous books about Oppenheimer but they can't touch this extraordinary book's impressive breadth and scope.” —The Miami Herald

“The first biography to give full due to Oppenheimer’s extraordinary complexity.... Stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled.” —The Boston Globe

From the Back Cover

"American Prometheus is the first full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," the brilliant, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the awesome fire of the sun for his country in time of war. Immediately after Hiroshima, he became the most famous scientist of his generation-one of the iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.
He was the author of a radical proposal to place international controls over atomic materials-an idea that is still relevant today. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Force's plans to fight an infinitely dangerous nuclear war. In the now almost-forgotten hysteria of the early 1950s, his ideas were anathema to powerful advocates of a massive nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss, Superbomb advocate Edward Teller and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worked behind the scenes to have a hearing board find that Oppenheimer could not be trusted with America's nuclear secrets.
"American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer's life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it is based on thousands of records and letters gathered from archives in America and abroad, on massive FBI files and on close to a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer's friends, relatives and colleagues.
We follow him from his earliest education at the turn of the twentieth century at New York City's Ethical Culture School, through personal crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world's mostaccomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, where he established, during the 1930s, the leading American school of theoretical physics, and where he became deeply involved with social justice causes and their advocates, many of whom were communists. Then to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he transformed a bleak mesa into the world's most potent nuclear weapons laboratory-and where he himself was transformed. And finally, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.
"American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a new and compelling portrait of a brilliant, ambitious, complex and flawed man profoundly connected to its major events-the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and history, and essential to our understanding of our recent past-and of our choices for the future.

About the Author

KAI BIRD is an award-winning historian and journalist. Executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, of McGeorge and William Bundy, Robert Ames, and President Jimmy Carter. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer. His work has been honored with the BIO Award for his significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. He has also written about the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C., with his wife, Susan Goldmark.

MARTIN J. SHERWIN is the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University and author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, as well as the American History Book Prize. He and his wife live in Boston and Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
In the first decade of the twentieth century, science initiated a second American revolution. A nation on horseback was soon transformed by the internal combustion engine, manned flight and a multitude of other inventions. These technological innovations quickly changed the lives of ordinary men and women. But simultaneously an esoteric band of scientists was creating an even more fundamental revolution. Theoretical physicists across the globe were beginning to alter the way we understand space and time. Radioactivity was discovered on March 1, 1896, by the French physicist Henri Becquerel. Max Planck, Marie Curie and Pierre Curie and others provided further insights into the nature of the atom. And then, in 1905, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Suddenly, the universe appeared to have changed.

Around the globe, scientists were soon to be celebrated as a new kind of hero, promising to usher in a renaissance of rationality, prosperity and social meritocracy. In America, reform movements were challenging the old order. Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era.

Into this world of promise was born J. Robert Oppenheimer, on April 22, 1904. He came from a family of first- and second-generation German immigrants striving to be American. Ethnically and culturally Jewish, the Oppenheimers of New York belonged to no synagogue. Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. This was at the same time an innovative approach to the quandaries any immigrant to America faced—and yet for Robert Oppenheimer it reinforced a lifelong ambivalence about his Jewish identity.

As its name suggests, Ethical Culture was not a religion but a way of life that promoted social justice over self-aggrandizement. It was no accident that the young boy who would become known as the father of the atomic era was reared in a culture that valued independent inquiry, empirical exploration and the free-thinking mind—in short, the values of science. And yet, it was the irony of Robert Oppenheimer’s odyssey that a life devoted to social justice, rationality and science would become a metaphor for mass death beneath a mushroom cloud.

Robert’s father, Julius Oppenheimer, was born on May 12, 1871, in the German town of Hanau, just east of Frankfurt. Julius’ father, Benjamin Pinhas Oppenheimer, was an untutored peasant and grain trader who had been raised in a hovel in “an almost medieval German village,” Robert later reported. Julius had two brothers and three sisters. In 1870, two of Benjamin’s cousins by marriage emigrated to New York. Within a few years these two young men—named Sigmund and Solomon Rothfeld—joined another relative, J. H. Stern, to start a small company to import men’s suit linings. The company did extremely well serving the city’s flourishing new trade in ready-made clothing. In the late 1880s, the Rothfelds sent word to Benjamin Oppenheimer that there was room in the business for his sons.

Julius arrived in New York in the spring of 1888, several years after his older brother Emil. A tall, thin-limbed, awkward young man, he was put to work in the company warehouse, sorting bolts of cloth. Although he brought no monetary assets to the firm and spoke not a word of English, he was determined to remake himself. He had an eye for color and in time acquired a reputation as one of the most knowledgeable “fabrics” men in the city. Emil and Julius rode out the recession of 1893, and by the turn of the century Julius was a full partner in the firm of Rothfeld, Stern & Company. He dressed to fit the part, always adorned in a white high-collared shirt, a conservative tie and a dark business suit. His manners were as immaculate as his dress. From all accounts, Julius was an extremely likeable young man. “You have a way with you that just invites confidence to the highest degree,” wrote his future wife in 1903, “and for the best and finest reasons.” By the time he turned thirty, he spoke remarkably good English, and, though completely self-taught, he had read widely in American and European history. A lover of art, he spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York’s numerous art galleries.

It may have been on one such occasion that he was introduced to a young painter, Ella Friedman, “an exquisitely beautiful” brunette with finely chiseled features, “expressive gray-blue eyes and long black lashes,” a slender figure—and a congenitally unformed left hand. To hide this deformity, Ella always wore long sleeves and a pair of chamois gloves. The glove covering her left hand contained a primitive prosthetic device with a spring attached to an artificial thumb. Julius fell in love with her. The Friedmans, of Bavarian Jewish extraction, had settled in Baltimore in the 1840s. Ella was born in 1869. A family friend once described her as “a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, extremely polite; she was always thinking what would make people comfortable or happy.” In her twenties, she spent a year in Paris studying the early Impressionist painters. Upon her return she taught art at Barnard College. By the time she met Julius, she was an accomplished enough painter to have her own students and a private rooftop studio in a New York apartment building.

All this was unusual enough for a woman at the turn of the century, but Ella was a powerful personality in many respects. Her formal, elegant demeanor struck some people upon first acquaintance as haughty coolness. Her drive and discipline in the studio and at home seemed excessive in a woman so blessed with material comforts. Julius worshipped her, and she returned his love. Just days before their marriage, Ella wrote to her fiancé: “I do so want you to be able to enjoy life in its best and fullest sense, and you will help me take care of you? To take care of someone whom one really loves has an indescribable sweetness of which a whole lifetime cannot rob me. Good-night, dearest.”

On March 23, 1903, Julius and Ella were married and moved into a sharp-gabled stone house at 250 West 94th Street. A year later, in the midst of the coldest spring on record, Ella, thirty-four years old, gave birth to a son after a difficult pregnancy. Julius had already settled on naming his firstborn Robert; but at the last moment, according to family lore, he decided to add a first initial, “J,” in front of “Robert.” Actually, the boy’s birth certificate reads “Julius Robert Oppenheimer,” evidence that Julius had decided to name the boy after himself. This would be unremarkable—except that naming a baby after any living relative is contrary to European Jewish tradition. In any case, the boy would always be called Robert and, curiously, he in turn always insisted that his first initial stood for nothing at all. Apparently, Jewish traditions played no role in the Oppenheimer household.

Sometime after Robert’s arrival, Julius moved his family to a spacious eleventh-floor apartment at 155 Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson River at West 88th Street. The apartment, occupying an entire floor, was exquisitely decorated with fine European furniture. Over the years, the Oppenheimers also acquired a remarkable collection of French Postimpressionist and Fauvist paintings chosen by Ella. By the time Robert was a young man, the collection included a 1901 “blue period” painting by Pablo Picasso entitled Mother and Child, a Rembrandt etching, and paintings by Edouard Vuillard, André Derain and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Three Vincent Van Gogh paintings—Enclosed Field with Rising Sun (Saint-Remy, 1889), First Steps (After Millet) (Saint-Remy, 1889) and Portrait of Adeline Ravoux (Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890)—dominated a living room wallpapered in gold gilt. Sometime later they acquired a drawing by Paul Cézanne and a painting by Maurice de Vlaminck. A head by the French sculptor Charles Despiau rounded out this exquisite collection.*

Ella ran the household to exacting standards. “Excellence and purpose” was a constant refrain in young Robert’s ears. Three live-in maids kept the apartment spotless. Robert had a Catholic Irish nursemaid named Nellie Connolly, and later, a French governess who taught him a little French. German, on the other hand, was not spoken at home. “My mother didn’t talk it well,” Robert recalled, “[and] my father didn’t believe in talking it.” Robert would learn German in school.

On weekends, the family would go for drives in the countryside in their Packard, driven by a gray-uniformed chauffeur. When Robert was eleven or twelve, Julius bought a substantial summer home at Bay Shore, Long Island, where Robert learned to sail. At the pier below the house, Julius moored a forty-foot sailing yacht, christened the Lorelei, a luxurious craft outfitted with all the amenities. “It was lovely on that bay,” Robert’s brother, Frank, would later recall fondly. “It was seven acres . . . a big vegetable garden and lots and lots of flowers.” As a family friend later observed, “Robert was doted on by his parents. . . . He had everything he wanted; you might say he was brought up in luxury.” But despite this, none of his childhood friends thought him spoiled. “He was extremely generous with money and material things,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “He was not a spoiled child in any sense.”

By 1914, when World War I broke out in Europe, Julius Oppenheimer was a very prosperous businessman. His net worth certainly totaled more than several hundred thousand dollars—which made him the equivalent of a multimillionaire in current dollars. By all accounts, the Oppenheimer marriage was a loving partnership. But Robert’s friends were always struck by their contrasting personalities. “He [Julius] was jolly German-Jewish,” recalled Francis Fergusson, one of Robert’s closest friends. “Extremely likeable. I was surprised that Robert’s mother had married him because he seemed such a hearty and laughing kind of person. But she was very fond of him and handled him beautifully. They were very fond of each other. It was an excellent marriage.”

Julius was a conversationalist and extrovert. He loved art and music and thought Beethoven’s Eroica symphony “one of the great masterpieces.” A family friend, the anthropologist George Boas, later recalled that Julius “had all the sensitiveness of both his sons.” Boas thought him “one of the kindest men I ever knew.” But sometimes, to the embarrassment of his sons, Julius would burst out singing at the dinner table. He enjoyed a good argument. Ella, by contrast, sat quietly and never joined in the banter. “She [Ella] was a very delicate person,” another friend of Robert’s, the distinguished writer Paul Horgan, observed, “. . . highly attenuated emotionally, and she always presided with a great delicacy and grace at the table and other events, but [she was] a mournful person.”

Four years after Robert’s birth, Ella bore another son, Lewis Frank Oppenheimer, but the infant soon died, a victim of stenosis of the pylorus, a congenital obstruction of the opening from the stomach to the small intestine. In her grief, Ella thereafter always seemed physically more fragile. Because young Robert himself was frequently ill as a child, Ella became overly protective. Fearing germs, she kept Robert apart from other children. He was never allowed to buy food from street vendors, and instead of taking him to get a haircut in a barber shop Ella had a barber come to the apartment.

Introspective by nature and never athletic, Robert spent his early childhood in the comfortable loneliness of his mother’s nest on Riverside Drive. The relationship between mother and son was always intense. Ella encouraged Robert to paint—he did landscapes—but he gave it up when he went to college. Robert worshipped his mother. But Ella could be quietly demanding. “This was a woman,” recalled a family friend, “who would never allow anything unpleasant to be mentioned at the table.”

Robert quickly sensed that his mother disapproved of the people in her husband’s world of trade and commerce. Most of Julius’s business colleagues, of course, were first-generation Jews, and Ella made it clear to her son that she felt ill-at-ease with their “obtrusive manners.” More than most boys, Robert grew up feeling torn between his mother’s strict standards and his father’s gregarious behavior. At times, he felt ashamed of his father’s spontaneity—and at the same time he would feel guilty that he felt ashamed. “Julius’s articulate and sometimes noisy pride in Robert annoyed him greatly,” recalled a childhood friend. As an adult, Robert gave his friend and former teacher Herbert Smith a handsome engraving of the scene in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus where the hero is unclasping his mother’s hand and throwing her to the ground. Smith was sure that Robert was sending him a message, acknowledging how difficult it had been for him to separate from his own mother.

When he was only five or six, Ella insisted that he take piano lessons. Robert dutifully practiced every day, hating it all the while. About a year later, he fell sick and his mother characteristically suspected the worst, perhaps a case of infantile paralysis. Nursing him back to health, she kept asking him how he felt until one day he looked up from his sickbed and grumbled, “Just as I do when I have to take piano lessons.” Ella relented, and the lessons ended.

In 1909, when Robert was only five, Julius took him on the first of four transatlantic crossings to visit his grandfather Benjamin in Germany. They made the trip again two years later; by then Grandfather Benjamin was

seventy-five years old, but he left an indelible impression on his grandson. “It was clear,” Robert recalled, “that one of the great joys in life for him was reading, but he had probably hardly been to school.” One day, while watching Robert play with some wooden blocks, Benjamin decided to give him an encyclopedia of architecture. He also gave him a “perfectly conventional” rock collection consisting of a box with perhaps two dozen rock samples labeled in German. “From then on,” Robert later recounted, “I became, in a completely childish way, an ardent mineral collector.” Back home in New York, he persuaded his father to take him on rock-hunting expeditions along the Palisades. Soon the apartment on Riverside Drive was crammed with Robert’s rocks, each neatly labeled with its scientific name. Julius encouraged his son in this solitary hobby, plying him with books on the subject. Long afterward, Robert recounted that he had no interest in the geological origins of his rocks, but was fascinated by the structure of crystals and polarized light.

From the ages of seven through twelve, Robert had three solitary but all-consuming passions: minerals, writing and reading poetry, and building with blocks. Later he would recall that he occupied his time with these activities “not because they were something I had companionship in or because they had any relation to school—but just for the hell of it.” By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage Books; Reprint edition (May 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 721 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375726268
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375726262
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.21 x 1.58 x 7.97 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,012 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Nuclear Physics (Books)
- #9 in Scientist Biographies
- #48 in World History (Books)

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Kai Bird
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Kai Bird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer. His new book is The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. A biography of a CIA officer, The Good Spy was released on May 20, 2014 by Crown/Random House. Kai's last book was a memoir about the Middle East entitled Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978 (Scribner, April 27, 2010). It was a 2011 Finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. He is the co-author with Martin J. Sherwin of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), which also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Duff Cooper Prize for History in London. He wrote The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy & William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998). He is also co-editor with Lawrence Lifschultz of Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998). He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's writing fellowship, the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation's Study Center, Bellagio, Italy and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and a contributing editor of The Nation. He lives in Miami Beach.
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Martin J. Sherwin
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Margo

Outstanding biography

Reviewed in the United States on February 9, 2024

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I bought this to read after watching Oppenheimer (which is an amazing film btw). I knew it was a big book so wasn’t daunted by the 700 pages (including 150 pages of Notes). The narrative is dense, with 25 years worth of research by the two authors. Oppenheimer was a fascinating man. A genius with a complex emotional skill set. This biography is comprehensive. Tells of his tortured youth, his inability to “fit in.” His obsession with the mysteries of physics, developing from the practical to the theoretical. He was arrogant. He was naive. He was promiscuous. There is so much delicious detail the authors discovered. It is an enthralling read.
I will say, even reading just a couple of chapters at a time, my eyes strained. The print is fairly small. After we watched the film a second time, we wanted to re-read the book. Luckily there is an audio book so we got that too!
This biography won the Pulitzer Prize. It is a wonderful read, not all facts and figures and university lectures. And the 150 pages of Notes are as fascinating as the text. Highly, highly recommend this book.

33 people found this helpful

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Gillian Alessio

Fascinating book

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2024

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I really enjoyed American Prometheus. It was a fascinating read. Bird and Sherwin are skilled researchers and good writers. Their prose is crisp and simple. The history of Robert Oppenheimer is engaging. He was a remarkable man who lived a large life. I highly recommend this book. I highly recommend reading this book over seeing the movie Oppenheimer. I've tried watching the heralded film, but Oppenheimer's life and person are so grand and vexing, a movie, even a 3 1/2 hour movie can never do this man's life and impact on the world, justice.

6 people found this helpful

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dannie

Highly detailed

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2023

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There was so much information on Dr. Oppenheimer's life that this book felt intrusive. Every possible scrap of information or opinion is recorded. It's a long and interesting read, but it feels like the reader is just one of the spies that monitored everything this man did. There's a little judgementalism of Oppenheimer from the author sprinkled in, which I don't think should have been included. Oppenheimer was not a perfect human being, just a person with amazing intellectual abilities, and many many frailties.
There are several sections that seem to have been hurriedly pasted together and repeat, almost verbatim, previous parts.

This is an interesting historical read of you don't mind feeling a bit voyeuristic.

2 people found this helpful

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Almodather Awad

Worth Reading If Liked The Movie

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2024

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I watched Oppenheimer when it came out last summer. It was riveting. It won many Oscars. It is a masterpiece. But it also inspired me to pick up the book it was adapted from. I did not regret it. Although it is a very big read, it is very engaging. It is filled with so many details that it gets a bit overwhelming at times, but the overall arc of the life of Oppenheimer grounds all the threads that weave together through the story. I enjoyed every minute I spent reading this book.

One person found this helpful

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Uma Iyer Van Roosenbeek

An amazing, illuminatory and enthralling story of a formidable scientist!

Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2024

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Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin have done an awe-inspiring, stupendous and extraordinary job of telling the story of a magnificent man, a phenomenal physicist who also had an overall wondrous personality!! A person who was an all rounder in most aspects of life. He also had quirks, and at times impatience with the people he dealt with that made him unpopular with some of his acquaintances!

way he changes after losing his security clearance has to be read to be understood. He adjusted to his changed circumstances very well. He also had loyal friends like Dr. Rabi and others who stood by him through all the facets of his life.

Reading this awesome book was a life changing experience that made me wish I had chosen Physics instead of my own field of expertise!

Kudos to the authors! They deserved the Pulitzer!! And the pictures at the end of the book are most precious, resplendent and stupendous!!!

5 people found this helpful

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Vivian T

The movie was faithful to the book

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023

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This is not a quick read for sure. The book is so big it’s hard to hold, so probably better to read it on the Kindle. I got it from the library, and it was falling apart to such an extent that when I returned it, it really needed to be re-glued before they could give it to another reader. That being said, I found Oppenheimer a very interesting person. You really couldn’t get that much of a handle on who he was in the movie, compared to reading the book.
Definitely worth the effort and very well done, including his relationship with his wife and children, which is always an interesting part of any book. It certainly helps to know the history of our country during those years. My granddaughter, age 18, went to see it, and I wanted to make sure she knew about the house un-American activities committee and what was going on at that time in our country. My husband, a newspaper journalist in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, back in the day, interviewed Oppenheimer for his newspaper. He mentioned to me that he thought Oppenheimer was haunted by his connection to the bomb, and that made me all the more interested in seeing the film. He was a man who did everything he could to stop the proliferation of the H bomb. He never could’ve dreamed the way things would go. After reading this, I decided that I could no longer defend Harry Truman for the bombing of Nagasaki, especially when one finds out that the Japanese were so close to surrendering. How can you ignore a nation with so many innocent people at risk? I thought Truman was smarter and more sensitive than he turns out to be, according to these authors. All in all, an interesting read and well worth your time.

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Matthew D. Johnson

Still amazing.

Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2024

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I read “American Prometheus” when it came out. I decided to reread it before I watched the movie “Oppenheimer.”

Once again, I was struck by the phenomenal writing, and attention to detail that humanized a man that many never understood.

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Tudo conforme o combinado! Agradeço e recomendo.

Recomendo

Reviewed in Brazil on March 25, 2024

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Miguel Barón

Before I could realize I was fully immersed in the witch-hunting McCarthy era

Reviewed in Mexico on December 15, 2023

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Capturing the sanctum sanctorum behind the tale of such an enigmatic and controversial figure like J. Robbert Oppenheimer, by itself is a nontrivial effort. While reading through the pages of the book I could only imagine the amount of documents gathered and reviewed to deliver such a well-written and engaging narrative the way Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin did.

At times I felt I was reading a novel, with twists, ups, and downs, and before I could realize I was fully immersed in the witch-hunting McCarthy era in which the most remarkable victim by far is the man whose face is on the cover.

Oppenheimer's life is full of shades of grey, worth being studied in the secular way the authors and the team of collaborators did. This is by far the most seminal work I have read that introduces you not only to the physics of the last century but also to the Shakespearean tragedy of the man who was betrayed by his own kind.

mholyome

Very well researched.

Reviewed in Canada on September 5, 2023

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I am only 1/3rd of the way into this richly researched book, but I am really enjoying it. Kind of a fun mixture between memoir and text book. Very informative. I read Robert J Sawyer's Oppenheimer Alternative last year, and together they make for great reading. I may change my mind after completing the book, but as it stands, it's a lovely bit of non-fiction, almost biography.

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Sri Surya

The best book

Reviewed in India on April 22, 2024

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The book contains every minor detail. It is so interesting that by reading this book, we can feel as if we are in the story and can see what's going on there.

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Jose Benito Bravo Monge

Interesante

Reviewed in Spain on March 24, 2024

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Muy interesante

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