Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center

"Revered biographer Ray Monk solves the enigma of Robert Oppenheimer's life and personality and brilliantly illuminates his contribution to the revolution in twentieth-century physics. In Robert Oppenheimer, Ray Monk delves into the rich and complex intellectual life of America's most fascinating and elusive scientist, the father of the atomic bomb. As a young professor at Berkeley, the wealthy, cultured Oppenheimer finally came into his own as a physicist and also began a period of support for Communist activities. At the high point of his life, he was chosen to lead the Manhattan Project and develop the deadliest weapon on earth: the atomic bomb. Upon its creation, Oppenheimer feared he had brought mankind to the precipice of self-annihilation and refused to help create the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, bringing the wrath of McCarthyite suspicion upon him. In the course of famously dramatic public hearings, he was stripped of his security clearance. Drawing on original research and interviews, Monk traces the wide range of influences on Oppenheimer's development--his Jewishness, his social isolation at Harvard, his love of Sanskrit, his radical politics. This definitive portrait finally solves the enigma of the extraordinary, charming, tortured man whose beautiful mind fundamentally reshaped the world"--