When pink was far from rosy

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, remembered that when he saw the first mushroom cloud rise in its terrifying beauty above the test site in New Mexico, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita came into his head: ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ According to a colleague, however, what he actually said was, ‘Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.’ Oppenheimer the legend vs. Oppenheimer the man. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in this magisterial reconstruction of the rise and fall of America’s first great theoretical physicist, are careful to give both sides, the Sanskrit-reading mystic and the down-to-earth pragmatist.

There have been many books on Oppenheimer — shelves-full, perhaps libraries-full — but American Prometheus is the first to attempt to explore more than a single facet: not just Oppenheimer the physicist, or Oppenheimer the creator of Los Alamos, or Oppenheimer the victim of a government witch-hunt, but all of these, and more.