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Jon Turney salutes an exhaustive study of the rise and (relative) fall of a brilliant, bewildering mind.
Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer
By Ray Monk
Jonathan Cape, 832pp, Pounds 30.00
ISBN 9780224062626
Published 15 November 2012
It is hard to think of a more daunting biographical subject than J. Robert Oppenheimer. He understood abstruse mathematics and physics most of us cannot truly grasp, and assimilated with ease other subjects that ordinary folk never get around to - learning Sanskrit to read the Bhagavadgita being the most famous example. Even among the theoretical physics elite, his powers of apprehension were astonishing. They existed in spite of, or perhaps because of, a complex psyche. Associates found him either ineffably charming or astoundingly rude, or both. He had a pained self- consciousness second only to Hamlet. Give such a man a central role in key moments of the 20th century, most notably the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, and the task of weighing the life, the work and its significance is pretty substantial.
It is also, it seems, irresistible. The reasons were vividly apparent in Oppenheimer: The Father of the Atomic Bomb, a seven-part drama series Peter Goodchild made for the BBC in 1980, an effort that also produced one of the first biographies. The protagonist's unsettled soul, along with tortured relationships, moral agonising, murky politics, double dealing and dodgy dossiers, were all indispensable parts of a story of a remarkable rise - leading the largest science and engineering project in history - and (partial) fall, with withdrawal of his government security clearance following a humiliating hearing in 1954. Add world-shattering discoveries and intimate involvements with the most brilliant minds of the era, and few figures are more fascinating.
Authors squaring up to Oppenheimer have not been hard to find since Goodchild's effort. At least six volumes about the man appeared around the time of the centenary of his birth in 2004. None, arguably, is definitive. Ray Monk, whose work follows in their wake, certainly argues that. In particular, he points out that the Pulitzer prize-winning 2005 biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, while a "monumental piece of scholarship", is...