Book description
J. Robert Oppenheimer is among the most contentious and important
figures of the twentieth century. As head of the Los Alamos
Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis to
develop the first atomic bomb - a breakthrough which was to have
eternal ramifications for mankind, and made Oppenheimer the 'father of
the Bomb'.
Oppenheimer was a man of diverse interests and phenomenal
intellectual attributes. His talent and drive allowed him as a young
scientist to enter a community peopled by the great names of
twentieth-century physics - men such as Bohr, Born, Dirac and Einstein
- and to play a role in the laboratories and classrooms where the
world was being changed forever.
But Oppenheimer's was not a simple story of assimilation, scientific
success and world fame. A complicated and fragile personality, the
implications of the discoveries at Los Alamos were to weigh heavily
upon him. Having formed suspicious connections in the 1930s, in the
wake of the Allied victory in World War Two, Oppenheimer's attempts to
resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race would lead many to
question his loyalties - and set him on a collision course with
Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunters.
As with Ray Monk's peerless biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand
Russell, Inside the Centre is a work of towering scholarship. A
story of discovery, secrecy, impossible choices and unimaginable
destruction, it goes deeper than any previous work in revealing the
motivations and complexities of this most brilliant and divisive of men.
The inspired philosophical biographer of Wittgenstein and Bertrand
Russell now turns his attention to the nuclear physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer and the profound human dilemmas of American science and the
atomic bomb. This is an eagerly awaited and important book which will
explore new boundaries in the writing of biography itself. Richard
Holmes Meticulously researched analysis...a triumph of historical
investigation -- Gerard Degroot Sunday Telegraph You don't need to know
your mesons or your melons to be gripped by Oppenheimer's discursive
journey to the heart of the American atomic machine -- Ed Caesar Sunday
Times Magisterial and moving book -- John Gray Literary Review A
compelling and superbly researched biography...an extraordinarily rich
biography, superbly researched and written with impressive clarity. It
is a considerably achievement of scholarship -- Graham Farmelo The Times
Ray Monk is the author of
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
for which he won the
Mail on Sunday
/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Award, and
Bertrand
Russell: The Spirit of Solitude
. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.
