Reviews for J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century

The average rating for J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-06 00:00:00 Andrew Grette On December 2, 1963, President Johnson presented the Enrico Fermi Award to Robert Oppenheimer in honor of his Manhattan Project work as director of Los Alamos. To be honest, when I think of Robert Oppenheimer, that is what comes to mind, but it gets very little attention in this book. Is this an oversight? Not at all. Plenty of other authors have addressed this, and there is a lot more to Robert Oppenheimer than his work in the Manhattan Project. Even so, that work is the fulcrum on which the book turns, for it focuses on how he became the unlikely right man for the job and then on how he both shaped and was shaped by post-war nuclear weapons development and the arms race. The son of German Jewish immigrants, he grew up socially isolated and with a silver spoon in his mouth on account of a highly successful family business. Although his family wealth offered him ample opportunities for education, his near polymathic interests prevented him from focusing on any one thing, and he didn't buckle down into physics until just after the crest of the quantum mechanics revolution. In other words, he missed the cutting edge and had to settle for mop-up operations. Yet, after completing his education both in the U.S. and Europe, he settled down in academia, splitting his time between Cal Tech and Berkeley, benefiting from a period of concerted investment in elite institutions intended to pave the way for American scientists to overtake their colleagues in Europe and make the 20th century the American century. Like many scions of wealth, not having to work for his money, he became enamored with left-wing causes and likely even became a member of the Communist Party. Surprisingly enough, this didn't cause him much trouble during the Manhattan Project, for General Groves may well have allowed that history to hang over his head like a sword of Damocles in order to keep him in line. It also may have helped him prepare for the job by allowing him, a neurotic left-wing academic, to develop the organizational skills he would need to keep an army of scientists on task in the complex effort to design both a uranium bomb and a plutonium bomb, a task comparable to herding cats. Later, after the war, when he opposed development of the hydrogen bomb, then known as the "super," national security hawks, uncharitably interpreting his nuanced opposition as a delaying tactic to allow the Soviets to gain ground on the U.S., used that history against him in a successful effort to strip him of his security clearance and silence a voice that refused to tell them what they wanted to hear. So, what is my verdict? Robert Oppenheimer was an exceedingly complex man to whom we owe a debt of gratitude for his efforts to help end the war with Japan, and I commend Dr. Cassidy for his multi-dimensional portrait of a man who was anything but one-dimensional.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-28 00:00:00 ITUMELENG Tshabalala I've been fascinated by the mythology of Oppenheimer for years now (really, ever since I heard his "I am become death" quote regarding the construction of the atomic bomb - it's haunting). I grabbed this biography off the shelf on my way out of Half Price Books on a whim and gave it a whirl. Essentially, what the author is trying to achieve is to place Oppenheimer into historical context against the changing relationship between physics, scientists, the US public, and the US government from the early part of the 20th century roughly up to the space race of the 60s. Overall, I'd say he succeeds and does a fair job of asserting Oppenheimer's criticality to the evolution of science in America across that time period. It is evident that especially after the Manhattan project, Oppenheimer was a key figure in the perception of physical science and what it could contribute to American growth and development - therefore, as perceptions of Oppenheimer changed, perceptions of the value and role of scientists were affected in kind. However, as a biography of the man, it falls short at times. First, in a biography, I'm hoping for some "humanization" figures who are too often reduced to bullet points. Tell me about the time they took a girl to a dance or got caught cow-tipping in their uncle's pasture. Something like that. This biography provides a few minor elements like that, but overall, keeps the subject at something of a distance. Second, when it comes time to discuss the key activity of the man's life (the invention of the atomic bomb), the author essentially says "hey, there's been tons of books written about that, so I'm not going to take my time to discuss that here". While I understand the argument to some extent, it's a little frustrating and I would have preferred a slightly longer text that included at least enough detail that I didn't feel like I'd walked away with a reading assignment to really understand the critical event in the man's life. Overall, a decent read, but the above-mentioned shortcomings were just nagging enough to stick with me throughout.