Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind (A Life Inside the Center)
*Starred Review* Robert Oppenheimer believed that “when we are blind to the evil in ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves.” In this deeply humanizing biography, Monk invites readers to contemplate the unexpected evil—and good—in the man known as “the father of the A-bomb.” Though he acknowledges debts to Bird and Sherwin’s American Prometheus (2005), Thorpe’s Oppenheimer(2006), and Pais’ J. Robert Oppenheimer (2006), Monk delves deeper than any predecessor into Oppenheimer’s inner life, not his historical or political circumstances. By diving deep into that turbid inner life, readers learn that in confessing that as a Manhattan Project scientist, he had “known sin,” Oppenheimer was expressing regret for intellectual pride, not guilt for the deaths at Hiroshima. Sustained probing also exposes the character defects that made Oppenheimer vulnerable to McCarthy-era charges of disloyalty and that later made him a divisive director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Deep in Oppenheimer’s psyche, Monk finds festering frustration at not having attained the stature of Einstein and Bohr. But readers may marvel at such frustration, given Oppenheimer’s immense achievements as a pioneer in probing the heart of atoms and of black holes. Perceptive and detailed, this portrait illuminates a potent but complex mind. --Bryce Christensen