American Prometheus book review

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird (Author), Martin J. Sherwin (Author). American Prometheus is the primary full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” the sensible, charismatic physicist who led the effort to capture the superior fireplace of the solar for his nation in a time of war. Instantly after Hiroshima, he turned the most well-known scientist of his era-one of many iconic figures of the twentieth century, the embodiment of modern man confronting the consequences of scientific progress.

He was the creator of a radical proposal to put international controls over atomic materials-a thought that's still related today. He opposed the event of the hydrogen bomb and criticized the Air Power’s plans to battle an infinitely harmful nuclear war. In the now nearly-forgotten hysteria of the early Nineteen Fifties, his concepts were anathema to powerful advocates of an enormous nuclear buildup, and, in response, Atomic Power 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 couldn't be trusted with America’s nuclear secrets.

American Prometheus sets forth Oppenheimer’s life and times in revealing and unprecedented detail. Exhaustively researched, it's based mostly on 1000's of records and letters gathered from archives in America and overseas, on massive FBI files and on near a hundred interviews with Oppenheimer’s associates, family members and colleagues.

We follow him from his earliest training on the flip of the 20th century at New York City’s Ethical Tradition Faculty, by way of private crises at Harvard and Cambridge universities. Then to Germany, where he studied quantum physics with the world’s most accomplished theorists; and to Berkeley, California, the place he established, throughout the Thirties, the main American college of theoretical physics, and where he grew to become deeply concerned with social justice causes and their advocates, lots of whom have been 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 at last, to the Institute for Superior Research in Princeton, which he directed from 1947 to 1966.

American Prometheus is a rich evocation of America at midcentury, a brand new and compelling portrait of an excellent, ambitious, advanced and flawed man profoundly linked to its main events-the Despair, World Struggle II and the Cold War. It is at once biography and historical past, and important to our understanding of our recent past-and of our decisions for the future.

Kai Chook's and Martin J. Sherwin's biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer is a deeply researched, fastidiously judged and properly-written examination of the life and politics of the person who directed the development of the atom bomb. The story is a posh one among murky motivations and huge penalties, and to the credit of the authors, who supply their own standpoint on central questions, they do not evade the complexity of the questions or the possibility that others would answer them differently. They have finished the hard and thorough work on which first-price biography depends: they've located and reviewed the primary supply paperwork, mastered the secondary literature, and interviewed scores of those with private information and data to offer. The story they inform is of a man with large mental-and as it turned out, organizational-items, and faults of a comparable magnitude. The book is first-rate. 

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 

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

736 pages

Knopf; First Edition edition (April 5, 2005)

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