Oppenheimer in 1946 (Ed Westcott)
Streshinsky’s review was published by The American Scholar, the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.
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Sixty-eight years into the atomic age, North Korea routinely threatens a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States, while a nuclear-armed Israel warily eyes Iran’s efforts to build its own weapons of mass destruction. That we live on the edge of apocalypse is surely one of the reasons that American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, father of the first atomic bomb and symbol of its moral ambiguities, remains such a tantalizing subject for biographers. The latest to weigh in is Ray Monk, a philosophy professor at England’s University of Southampton, whose Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center charts his subject’s path from outsider to quintessential insider—the polymath at the heart of some of the most crucial events of the first half of a brutal century.
Monk gives us the basics: Oppenheimer was born in 1904 into a wealthy, secular Jewish family in New York. Discovering physics in high school, he described the field to his younger brother as having “a beauty which no other science can match, a rigor and austerity and depth.” He raced through Harvard, Cambridge, and Germany’s University of Göttingen before returning to the United States to build its leading center of theoretical physics at the University of California at Berkeley. Like many intellectuals in the 1930s, he closely associated himself with leftwing politics and had numerous Communist friends, including the woman who became his wife, though he himself never joined the party. During World War II, Oppenheimer led the secret effort to build an atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, but after Hiroshima and Nagasaki he declared that physicists “had known sin” and determined to lead the way to international control of nuclear weapons. He went on to be labeled a security risk during the McCarthy era and was effectively expelled from government service. Oppenheimer would spend the final 18 years of his life as director of the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
But as Monk writes, personal and political details like those ignore the science that informed Oppenheimer’s life. As a case in point, he cites Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize–winning American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he calls “a very fine book indeed, a monumental piece of scholarship.” That it was published to rave reviews eight years into Monk’s 15-year labor gave him pause. Happily, he soldiered on, for his Robert Oppenheimer is a fine book and a monumental piece of scholarship in its own right. Monk adds another dimension to the story by interpreting the physics that was, after all, Oppenheimer’s central preoccupation.
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To read the complete review, please click here.
Shirley Streshinsky is the co-author, with Patricia Klaus, of An Atomic Love Story: The Extraordinary Women in Robert Oppenheimer’s Life, to be published in September.