American Prometheus. The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin (ISBN 9780375726262, Vintage Books)

The pulitzer prize winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer. The one on which the Oppenheimer movie from 2023 is based. I read the book after seeing the movie. The main reason being I didn’t have the book yet and it took some time before it got delivered. Instead I read the biography by Pais first before watching the movie. I finally got the book not too long after watching the movie but as the urgency to read it soon was no longer there it got the usual treatment of incubating for a while in the pile of new books. Then, with x-mas approaching I decided to tackle this 750 page thick book during the holidays. I managed to get through the small print pages in about 3 weeks without ever having to force myself to continue reading. On the contrary, on many occasion I had to force myself to stop reading and go to bed. This is a very well written book. You learn a lot about Oppenheimer the man, the physicist and the public figure but also about the times in which he lived. Besides biography this book is also an engaging history book. It helps that Oppenheimer was a complex and at times ambiguous figure, certainly not a saint. Compared to the movie the book is able to take the time to add many layers of complexity to Oppenheimer’s character. Reading this book makes you feel like you know Oppenheimer a little bit like you would know someone in real life. Oppenheimer is portrayed as a person of flesh and blood with good and bad sides, strengths and weaknesses. Because of his involvement in the Manhattan project and his leftish sympathies he was kept under surveillance by the FBI for many years and as a result a lot of things are known about Oppenheimer’s private life that would normally would have remained hidden. I was not very familiar before I read the book and saw the movie so his breadth of interest and knowledge were all new to me. He was intellectually undoubtably an exceptional human being. What impressed me most was his early realisation that the atomic bomb was going to trigger an arms race and his ideas about how to control proliferation. Unfortunately these ideas were politically too far ahead of their time and the politicians and the military had different and decidedly short sighted view on the matter. This, together with the anti communist hysteria of the fifties lead to the orchestrated downfall of Oppenheimer. Many of the issues discussed in this little bit of recent American history are unfortunately still very relevant today. Recommended reading, if only to make you realise that even though we are living in crazy times, it was already crazy in Oppenheimer’s time.