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1.64k reviews for:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Martin J. Sherwin, Kai Bird
4.33 AVERAGE
1.64k reviews for:
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Martin J. Sherwin, Kai Bird
4.33 AVERAGE
informative
Almost completely riveting, definitely slowed down for me personally near the middle end but truly fascinating stuff overall. Well written and it was especially fun to look up characters’ movie counterparts on Letterboxd. Added a bit more context to Oppenheimer’s antics and arguments.
informative
reflective
tense
fast-paced
This is a bit of a tome. I am sure that the authors had an enormous job boiling this down--considering the amount of information they had to work with. Still, I felt like the book was hijacked by the details of the sad end to Dr. Oppenheimer's career at the hands of political extremists. Would have liked to read more about his considerable talents administering the project itself.
i can see why chris nolan made his masterpiece after this
Excellent biography of a fascinating complex character and period. I knew very little about Oppie. So this was a revelation. America’s continued lunacy is amply on display as well.
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
slow-paced
The book is fairly well written but it can be so meandering and bogged down in details. I think it could definitely have been shorter and more streamlined. However the authors always made some interesting point although it was drawn out. The focal individual is an interesting person who lived an eventful life that coincided with many of the societal issues of his time and the writers communicated this well.
I read American Prometheus before I saw the movie Oppenhiemer but while reading, I absolutely understood why someone would make a movie out of it. The whole time I was reading I kept thinking of a couple of other movies. The comparison is not of content, but of style.
This book is exhaustively researched and includes quotes from many, many people who knew J. Robert Oppenheimer, including quotes from himself which we can assume are accurate as they came from the transcripts of FBI wiretaps that were illegally placed on his phone. But despite having so many voices, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what happened in many cases, simply because everyone has their own memory and interpretation of events.
This put me in mind of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ work on the impossibility of knowing another person completely. In that film, Kane dies in the opening scene. The rest of the movie is told in flashbacks as a single journalist tries to piece together Kane’s life and motivations from interviews and discussions with people who knew the man.
Was Kane a great man? Did he start as a good man who became corrupt? Was he motivated by the desire to do good or by ego? Did his motivations change at different points in his life? The journalist never gets definitive answers and correctly deduces that even if he figured out what “Rosebud” (Kane’s final words) meant, it would hardly unlock the secret to a man’s entire life. His view of Kane changes depending on who he is listening to.
The same thing can be said of this book. Major incidents in Oppenheimer’s life are meticulously recorded… but the details don’t always match. Take the “poison apple” incident where a young Oppenheimer is supposed to have poisoned an apple belonging to a university tutor he didn’t like. The book lays out the different versions of events that Oppenheimer told different people over the years. Whether the poison used was necessarily lethal can’t be proved. The precise time of when the event occurred is described differently. The authors point out that the university certainly reacted as if something significant happened, but their reaction isn’t necessarily in keeping with attempted murder. We know how the university reacted but it isn’t documented precisely what they are reacting to. I give the authors a lot of credit for presenting everything and letting the reader make up their own mind.
Now that I’ve seen Oppenheimer, I should point out that unlike the movie, this biography is told in a much more straightforward manner. It starts at the beginning of his life and continues linearly to the end, providing a huge amount of detailed material, in some cases being a little bit dry.
Not surprisingly the bulk of the book is spent on the years in Los Alamos and his life afterwards including a lot of material concerning the revocation of his security clearance. Again, in these passages we aren’t always sure about what exactly happened.
Take the “Chevalier incident” where Oppenhiemer’s friend attempts to let him know that were Oppenheimer to wish certain information be passed along to the Soviets, that line of communication could be arranged. That short, simple chat in a kitchen became the focus of his later hearing for the non-renewal of his security clearance, but do we know what actually happened?
Oppenheimer himself freely admitted to lying about the encounter initially. But what was the truth? The authors have access to transcripts of illegal wiretaps that J. Edgar Hoover placed on his phone, but while they do not rely on someone’s memory of a phone conversation, we cannot say for certain that everyone recorded is being truthful. Again, credit to the authors for presenting all the available material as-is, giving some suggestions about what may be the truth may be, but never stating with the authorial voice of God as to what really happened.
It’s an interesting thought about how difficult it is to nail down the details in someone’s inner life, especially someone with a complicated life as Oppenheimer’s. His thoughts on the use of the bomb against the Japanese seems to have evolved over time, but we never really know what new information or what new thinking may have triggered those changes.
Even something that one might think of as being relatively straightforward is open to interpretation. One neighbor thought he was emotionally distant from his daughter. Another stated that he was clearly very proud of the girl. Again, I started thinking of Rashomon, another film about the inherent difficulty of relying on different voices to find a singular truth.
The end of the book, as with most biographies, deals with the conclusion of Oppenheimer’s life. As Oppenhimer is dying of throat cancer and undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment, my mind moved from film to song and to the lyrics of Lou Reed’s “The Power and the Glory” as he watches his friend dying of lung cancer:
This book is exhaustively researched and includes quotes from many, many people who knew J. Robert Oppenheimer, including quotes from himself which we can assume are accurate as they came from the transcripts of FBI wiretaps that were illegally placed on his phone. But despite having so many voices, it’s impossible to pin down exactly what happened in many cases, simply because everyone has their own memory and interpretation of events.
This put me in mind of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ work on the impossibility of knowing another person completely. In that film, Kane dies in the opening scene. The rest of the movie is told in flashbacks as a single journalist tries to piece together Kane’s life and motivations from interviews and discussions with people who knew the man.
Was Kane a great man? Did he start as a good man who became corrupt? Was he motivated by the desire to do good or by ego? Did his motivations change at different points in his life? The journalist never gets definitive answers and correctly deduces that even if he figured out what “Rosebud” (Kane’s final words) meant, it would hardly unlock the secret to a man’s entire life. His view of Kane changes depending on who he is listening to.
The same thing can be said of this book. Major incidents in Oppenheimer’s life are meticulously recorded… but the details don’t always match. Take the “poison apple” incident where a young Oppenheimer is supposed to have poisoned an apple belonging to a university tutor he didn’t like. The book lays out the different versions of events that Oppenheimer told different people over the years. Whether the poison used was necessarily lethal can’t be proved. The precise time of when the event occurred is described differently. The authors point out that the university certainly reacted as if something significant happened, but their reaction isn’t necessarily in keeping with attempted murder. We know how the university reacted but it isn’t documented precisely what they are reacting to. I give the authors a lot of credit for presenting everything and letting the reader make up their own mind.
Now that I’ve seen Oppenheimer, I should point out that unlike the movie, this biography is told in a much more straightforward manner. It starts at the beginning of his life and continues linearly to the end, providing a huge amount of detailed material, in some cases being a little bit dry.
Not surprisingly the bulk of the book is spent on the years in Los Alamos and his life afterwards including a lot of material concerning the revocation of his security clearance. Again, in these passages we aren’t always sure about what exactly happened.
Take the “Chevalier incident” where Oppenhiemer’s friend attempts to let him know that were Oppenheimer to wish certain information be passed along to the Soviets, that line of communication could be arranged. That short, simple chat in a kitchen became the focus of his later hearing for the non-renewal of his security clearance, but do we know what actually happened?
Oppenheimer himself freely admitted to lying about the encounter initially. But what was the truth? The authors have access to transcripts of illegal wiretaps that J. Edgar Hoover placed on his phone, but while they do not rely on someone’s memory of a phone conversation, we cannot say for certain that everyone recorded is being truthful. Again, credit to the authors for presenting all the available material as-is, giving some suggestions about what may be the truth may be, but never stating with the authorial voice of God as to what really happened.
It’s an interesting thought about how difficult it is to nail down the details in someone’s inner life, especially someone with a complicated life as Oppenheimer’s. His thoughts on the use of the bomb against the Japanese seems to have evolved over time, but we never really know what new information or what new thinking may have triggered those changes.
Even something that one might think of as being relatively straightforward is open to interpretation. One neighbor thought he was emotionally distant from his daughter. Another stated that he was clearly very proud of the girl. Again, I started thinking of Rashomon, another film about the inherent difficulty of relying on different voices to find a singular truth.
The end of the book, as with most biographies, deals with the conclusion of Oppenheimer’s life. As Oppenhimer is dying of throat cancer and undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment, my mind moved from film to song and to the lyrics of Lou Reed’s “The Power and the Glory” as he watches his friend dying of lung cancer:
The same power that burned Hiroshima
Causing three-legged babies and death
Shrunk to the size of a nickel
To help him regain his breath
And I was struck by the power and the glory
I was visited by a majestic Him
Great bolts of lightning, lighting up the sky
As the radiation flowed through him
He wanted all of it
Not some of it
I haven’t *actually* finished it. It’s 26 and something hours! I have read enough to know I learned enough watching the movie Oppenheimer. The book is quite a dry read. If I didn’t already have imagery courtesy of Christopher Nolan, I’d literally have none. No doubt Oppenheimer was a genius. And like many geniuses, a little twisted. The movie didn’t really cover that and I think an edited version of this book would have been more interesting.
A very complete and thorough biography. Reading it first, really helped me to follow the movie.