American PrometheusThe Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

American Prometheus is one of those titanic undertakings that make editors squeamish. Martin J. Sherwin worked on his biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer for 25 years before finally turning in a brick-sized tome that vacuums up all of the facts, documents and reminiscences remotely relevant to the man’s life, yielding a 26+ hour listening experience.

The good news is that it’s a riveting, bottomless story. Oppenheimer founded and directed the Los Alamos research facility in New Mexico where the scientists of the Manhattan Project built the atomic bomb. His single achievement is doomed to be that morally fraught invention, but Oppie (his preferred nickname) was always at the center of intellectually provocative and politically dangerous undertakings, from the welter of quantum physics and popular front politics in the '30s to post-war paranoia as the arms race began to ramp up.

It is in the nature of biographies to shape their subjects' lives into convenient narrative arcs. Oppie however is a genuinely Faustian character, who really does rise to the top, then flame out spectacularly. He sowed the seeds of his own destruction early in his career by involving himself with left-wing causes and communist operatives interested in procuring nuclear secrets — although he remained loyal to the US to the end, the eventual revocation of his security clearance would hinge on his suspicious early associations. The eventual revocation of his security clearance would hinge on these decisions. Delightfully light on hard science and heavy on spycraft and moral ambiguity, American Prometheus goes straight to the heart of postwar America by way of one infamous scientist.