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By the time the story reaches Oppenheimer's fateful Manhattan Project work, readers have been swept along much as the project's young physicists were by fate and enormous pressure. The authors allow the scientists to speak for themselves about their reactions to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, avoiding any sort of preacherly tone while revealing the utter, horrible ambiguity of the situation. For instance, Oppenheimer wrote in a letter to a friend, "The thing had to be done," then, "Circumstances are heavy with misgiving."
Many biographies of Oppenheimer end here, with the seeds of his later pacifism sown and the dangers of mixing science with politics clearly outlined. But Bird and Sherwin devote the second half of this hefty book to what happened to Oppenheimer after the bomb. For a short time, he was lionized as the ultimate patriot by a victorious nation, but things soured as the Cold War crept forward and anti-communist witchhunts focused paranoia and anti-Semitism onto Oppenheimer, destroying his career and disillusioning him about his life's work. Devastated by the atom bomb's legacy of fear, he became a vocal and passionate opponent of the Strangelovian madness that gripped the world because of the weapons he helped develop.
Twenty-five years of research went into creating American Prometheus, and there has never been a more honest and complete biography of this tragic scientific giant. The many great ironies of Oppenheimer's life are revealed through the careful reconstruction of a wealth of records, conversations, and ideas, leaving the clearest picture yet of his life. --Therese Littleton
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Book Description Condition: New. This book is in good condition; book and jacket are clean from marks or damage. 'an extraordinarily detailed look deep inside an 18th-century warship. Each turn of the page peels back a layer, moving through the vast ship from bow to stern, as the colorful spreads reveal fully-annotated cut-away illustrations'. Seller Inventory # 839
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Book Description Paperback. Condition: New. Reprint. A new tightly bound softcover in printed wraps. 8vo. Clean text free of marks or underlining, b&w photo plates. Contains author's notes, bibliography and an index. 721 pp. Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. THE INSPIRATION FOR THE 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. Seller Inventory # 2263
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